Yikes!
There was a sticker on it from it's previous home: "The Scooter Store" which I thought was some sort of hip Vespa dealer which made me happy. Nope. It was from the place that makes those scooters for fat people suffering from terminal laziness which I've spent a good part of my life making fun of. Oh, the irony...
It showed up with a pod setup and heavily scaled boilers and a general cover of grime. I tried to backflush it but the gasket was so hard it wouldn't even seal in the least. I knew it would be a while before I ever got a shot out of it. I was lucky to have a weekend alone and a day to order the parts from Chris Coffee who probably made as much or more off of me in parts as they would have if I'd bought a new machine. I've done this before: buy a used machine (motorcycle) for much less than it's worth and then proceed to pour more money than it's worth to restore it and I should have just bought the new one. In this case I actually did manage to save some money. Here was my weekend:
The boiler wasn't so bad:
The steam boiler was so bad though that I didn't take "before" photos because I thought it might be a lost cause. It was so heavy and thick I didn't think I'd be able to get it clean. I went to Home Despot and found some lime/scale/rust cleaner and plugged the boiler up and soaked it for almost a day with only some of the scale flaking off. Here's the stuff I used:
I discovered that heating the solution and using it full strength made a massive difference so this is what I did:
I'm sure this is wrong on many levels but I just didn't want to have to drag it out my shop space in Jersey and bead blast it - it also seemed too thick since I couldn't even chip it off. So, while I don't have any shots of the boiler before here's some of the scale that came out of the machine and part of the group gasket that I had to chisel out:
While this was going on I was soaking the group head in a similar solution:
Here's what the boiler looked like "after":
It took the better part of a day to get here.
After a solid weekend of scrubbing, descaling and installing new parts I got it running. I installed a new board, motor mounts, steam valve (leaking), arm and various gaskets and repaired some broken wires and mounts. It took a while to dial it in and for the most part I'm still doing that. My goal was to be able to make a cappuccino as good as 9th Street Espresso since I no longer live next door to them and my addiction to excellent coffee had to be sated. It's been fun to restore the machine and to learn how to coax good espresso out of it. I've got a ways to go but every morning I get to enjoy a great cappuccino. So, now that it's all done, here is my setup. I've got a Rancilio MD40 that a friend found in his building. I spent the week before the Vivaldi showed up stripping it (literally) down and then polishing it and installing new burrs.
While I was at the shop cleaning and polishing the Rancilio I took a few minutes to make a WDT funnel out of some aluminum tube to fit the portafilter - I tried the yogurt cup but it just didn't sit well with me on several levels. I also had some dental tools I used for prop styling so I took the one with the small spoon (for Cafiza) and ground it to a point to stir the coffee then tamp it.
Which brings us to here, what all of this was about:
Thanks to everyone on the this board because without the S1, VI and VII sites I might not have embarked on this but all the information here made this a fairly painless process. Special thanks to Tim from Chris' Coffee who helped me when I had questions and made sure all my parts showed up.
Gregor
beauties are so well built I guess there is no real need to by them new!
