Great work and pictures Paul! You make me feel lazy for sending mine to the engineers, but with only a 12V cordless drill and some cheapy drill bits it may be the best option for me Like you say - having the best quality tools make jobs like this so much easier.
Was the easy out you broke the special ones you ordered? I've bought some of the normal easy outs in the past, but never got around to using them after hearing the horror stories of them breaking.What do you hold the studs with? Loctite?

Ok, I just got to know. Which one of you guys is bidding on this? http://www.ebay.com/itm/GAGGIA-1-GU-VIN ... 2ebaf04468

JohnB. wrote:No vice grips? Oxy acetylene torch? I would consider heating the ends of the studs until they turn red most of the way down, letting them cool, soaking with a good penetrating oil & unscrewing using vice grips a better option then cutting/drilling/tapping. This should be done on any severely rusted stud before you attempt to remove it to avoid dealing with snapped off studs.

Hi John yes you are dead right. I did allude to this further up but didn't take any photos. I heated up the studs as my first choice even before attempting to undo the boiler hex bolts. Still no joy.

I would also add that before used the screw extractor I should have heated it up to cherry red but since it was flush with the brass flange I decided against it.

Paul

kitt wrote:Great work and pictures Paul! You make me feel lazy for sending mine to the engineers, but with only a 12V cordless drill and some cheapy drill bits it may be the best option for me Like you say - having the best quality tools make jobs like this so much easier.
Was the easy out you broke the special ones you ordered? I've bought some of the normal easy outs in the past, but never got around to using them after hearing the horror stories of them breaking.What do you hold the studs with? Loctite?

Hi Mike,

I secretly enjoy it actually. I put all that in there to show just how much work goes into these things.

The special easy outs will come next week. To hold the studs when you want to undo them you can use the mole grips (vice grips) or lock two nuts against each other and try and undo them like that.

Where the pipes and boiler on yours plated? Under all the dirt my pipes look like they are nickel plated, as is the boiler.

Paul

Paul_Pratt wrote:Where the pipes and boiler on yours plated? Under all the dirt my pipes look like they are nickel plated, as is the boiler.

I think my Tell is a slightly later vintage then your Orion, all my pipes etc were copper.

Boiler retapping is now complete.

I took an early lunch today and it took me 2 hours to work on the last 9 rusty studs that are fixed into the end of the boiler. It went very well. I think I've shown enough pictures of rusty studs and drill bits so I'll make this brief.

Here's the before...




Here's the boiler after I cut the studs off with an angle grinder and a cutting disc. I took a long time over this step to make sure that the disc did not touch the actual surface of the boiler. In fact I cut the studs off so that they stuck out by 2-3mm and then switched the disc to a thicker grinding wheel. Then I just laboriously feathered away being extra careful not to make any contact with the boiler surface.



Again it was the same routine, centre punch, centre drill then slowly go up in drill sizes and all the time using plenty of cutting fluid. I did a final hole of 8.5mm ready for the M10 tap. Here are all the holes done.



This time I had to do the tapping by hand so had to make sure that I was going in as straight as I could. Now there is something to mention here which I did not go over yesterday. The holes I am drilling and tapping are blind, in that they are closed off at the other end. It means that a standard tap can only cut threads so far down since it bottoms out when it hits the bottom. In that case you need more than 1 kind of tap. Usually they come in a set of 3 and they allow you to tap the threads right down into blind holes.



Sorry the photo is a bit mixed up but the order in which you tap are Middle, Right then Left - sometimes referred to as Taper, Plug and then the Bottoming tap

So it all went smoothly, only one threads in a bit wonky but it won't matter much. Testing with some longer studs..



And then testing with the boiler end plate I did yesterday...



So that is basically it for all this drilling and tapping. Well of course I still have the broken screw extractor to remove but the tool for that is on it's way and I am confident it will take a few mins to fix.

I know many people reading this will know all this stuff but it is worth going over again to also illustrate the kind of extra work that is sometimes required.

The next few days may be busy in the office so I am not sure what I can do. The boiler is still having a splash in the acid bath. I may start work on getting the frame back to bare metal and in primer.

WOW! Great pictures and information, thanks for sharing it. I can't wait to see more of this beauty.

I forgot to say what awesome manual machining skills! Brilliant!

Thanks Clay - I am self-taught so I'm certain there are plenty of mistakes along the way.

Like I said in the last post I am not sure what I will be able to do over the next few weeks, lots of Cafelat orders are piling up. Tomorrow I hope the shops will reopen after the big chinese new year shutdown and I can get the tool bit I need to finish extracting the broken off bit.

I did however manage to strip the 3 main painted pieces of the machine, those are the frame and the 2 side supports/trim pieces. Here is the frame.



Here is one of the side panels.



I tried to restore the side panels with some T-cut but they were too far gone with too many dings and dents. So I stripped the paint from them. I used a chemical paint stripper that you brush on and then let it go to work. It wasn't that effective on these panels so I ended up doing a lot of manual work with wallpaper scrapers and wire brushes. There was probably a good 2 hours doing this and I was wearing a full face shield (not just goggles) and a respirator and good gloves.

Of course some sort of media blasting would have done these panels in a fraction of that time but I don't have the space for the cabinet at the moment and I don't have anyone reliable to use. So I always do it by myself. The panels are aluminium and they cleaned up rather well. Sorry I don't have a photo of the frame but I will take a photo tomorrow. Here are the aluminium panels.



The panels will need to be tidied up a bit before painting, to remove a lot of dings and dents and to square up a lot of the edges. For about 5 mins I was looking at them and contemplating doing a nice brushed finish but I think I will stick to the original colour scheme of the machines.

OK just a brief post today. Remember the stud I was drilling out that has the snapped off screw extractor buried within? Well to drill it out is next to impossible, so my plan was to use a hole cutter that would remove the metal from around the broken bit and eventually the middle section holding the broken bit would fall out.

Here is an 8mm diamond tipped hole cutter.



It worked a charm, or well it did until it wore down. Diamonds aren't what they used to be It cost me $1.5 so I imagine it did better than I expected. Here is the progress, as you can see the part with the bit is getting left in the middle as I planned. I'll finish that tomorrow and the hole will be helicoiled so it can still accept an M8 bolt. I hope it works out ok because it looks like a right mess at the moment! I'm sure I can save it though.



Lastly just a bit of fun to finish the day with. I was setting up my polishing motor due to a new batch of special VST/Strada tampers for Chris. Anyway I decided to see if the aluminium sight glass surround would polish up. I wouldn't normally jump around like this but since I had the motor set up......



That was the surround in the flat state. And here he is after only a minute or so of polishing one half of it.



I'll go over metal polishing in more detail later. The sight glass surround still needs more polishing but you can get the idea.