Sansibar99 wrote:Hi Paul,

I found a possible solution for your ANCC-riddle:

Associazione Nationale Cooperative di Consumatori:

L'Associazione Nazionale Cooperative di Consumatori - Coop (ANCC-COOP), è stata costituita nel 1955.

And the 1.8 on your Presidents medallion could be the pressure, as to which the boiler was allowed/tested...

Any old folks from Italy around here?

Regards,
Holger

Thanks for that Holger. Good to know and confirm what I thought it was.

Not much happening with the machine this week as I have too much work to do. All I have done is to start cleaning up the front badges (the VA badge and the black eagle logo badge) and make some acorn nuts that hold the groups to the boiler. These were just made from some Hex bar stock.



Sure you can buy acorn nuts but I want to match the originals and the off the shelf nuts are just a bit too short, and besides this was a fun way to spend an hour. I had to make all 8, the originals were totally wrecked.

Oh and I also sorted out the sight glass and the seals. This is a custom glass and I will be able to use Wega/Astoria sight glass seals. Fits together very well.

Good stuff, but....




Why'd you flatten Rosie's head?!

He he. An uncanny resemblance!

UltramaticOrange wrote:Good stuff, but....

Why'd you flatten Rosie's head?!

Ha ha everyone who sees it says that it looks like a robot face.

Nothing else has happened, I cleaned up the old badge. It is acrylic (perpsex) and has the Victoria Arduino name engraved in the back. All I have done is clean it with soap and warm water then polish it using a buffing wheel and some compounds.



I touched up the gold lettering with some gold paint. This was done by hand using a brush with very thin paint so that it flows inside the channels. After that dried I applied the red paint to fill in the letters. This detail came from the VA book and the Cagliari book.



After that I need to find a nice blue that goes over the top of the gold and red parts. The Eagle badge was the same deal, but no red on this, just gold lines and it will have blue inside the gold lines.

Will fill in the blue in the next few days and then hopefully by the end of next week I will have more time to continue the bigger jobs.

great work!
If I had known, I would have taken better pictures ..

Right the front badges were done earlier this week, looking great. I'll save those for a big reveal when we get there.

I am still getting the bits ready for chrome, one job that needs to be done before I take the chrome is attaching the group dipper tubes back into the groups. Some groups the tube screws into the back, but on this is is soldered in place. You could of course solder after chrome plating but that is asking for trouble, the risk of damaging the chrome is just too great.

The pick up tubes were lead soldered in place originally so I took them out, removed all the lead solder and cleaned it all up. Here is the pick up tube and the back of the group. The lower hole is the inlet to the brewing chamber.



And this shows how the tube goes in.



And all in place.



I tried to solder the pipe in a few weeks ago but it did not work. Today I did it properly and it worked out well, I just made sure to get the group hot enough to take the solder. They will need cleaning up a bit more.



Both portafilters have had brass added to the underside of the ears now and they lock in very tightly.



That's all for now.

This is such an impressive build, much respect to you Paul. So often in the States such skills languish within an automotive context (winks at his V6 Alfa Romeo), and aren't fully realized as more widely applicable skills.

I'm just now finishing an early '70's La Cimbali M-15 two group Lever. After countless hours of wrenching, cleaning, descalling, soldering, polishing, reassembling, wiring and parts hunting I finally pulled the first shot. As it poured, Mr. M's editorial of James Bond's Europiccola came to mind: "Is that all it does?"

I think the answer to that depends on the person using the machine.

Cheers, Paul. Thanks for posting this resurrection, I look forward to the updates.

Great, you just miss 7 others to complete that year's collection...



Beautiful resurrection.

OK mini update. I am now starting to think about chrome, so I am getting all the parts that need chrome to be repaired before I send them out. That means getting all dents and dings out of them now. There are some chrome platers who will do all this for you for a large fee and it will take a long time. I prefer to do it myself.

So here is 1 of the groups with the chrome removed and after the first round of sanding to remove the dents which were not too bad. Next stage is a finer grit sanding and then buffing.



The main body is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare. Underneath all that dirt was a very badly dented body. I have slowly been trying my best to remove the dents but it is not easy. In this photo you can still see small dents (dark patches) after some sanding. All these need to be removed otherwise the final chrome finish will be pretty average.



A bit more hammering and some more sanding and it is getting a bit better.



I picked up a tip from some of those car programs on TV, if you give it a very light spray with paint and then roughly sand over it will leave the low spots, i.e. the blue paint will be left in the low (dented) spots.



Anyway this body work will take ages.

The other problem will be the horizontal ribs on the front panel of the machine. These are aluminium and they are all badly corroded. These I will have to do by hand, sanding and then polishing. These will be a massive pain, aluminium is not that easy to work with, I remember I did my Faemina base and it came out great but took a very long time.

Paul_Pratt wrote:I picked up a tip from some of those car programs on TV, if you give it a very light spray with paint and then roughly sand over it will leave the low spots, i.e. the blue paint will be left in the low (dented) spots.

Anyway this body work will take ages.

The light spray is called a guide coat. If you were using a light colored fill primer on a car body you'd mist coat with a cheap red oxide primer & block it down to show the low spots.

Are you using a body file after hammering or just hand sanding? Blocking with a body file followed by an orbital sander with a coarse disc & progressively finer discs will speed up the refinishing of the main body.