Refurbishing the Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine
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coffeeforums.co.uk
Around 5 years ago I restored a La Pavoni Europiccola manual lever espresso machine to working order. I bought it off of a "parts only" ebay listing for $200. It turns out it just needed new grouphead and base gaskets, some rustoleum, and some simple electrical work (new power switch and thermostat). After getting over the initial learning curve, this machine has consistently given me some amazing espresso shots, all while on a tight budget.
If you're interested in seeing more of these kinds of restorations, check out these videos from the Orphan Espresso guy, who is incredibly skilled:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Ymz8YJpcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_k-08sVlPw
I'll be saving for a while:
For the nerds on HN, the difference between a good grinder and junk is the consistency of particle size. There's an optimum particle size that will result in the greatest amount of desirable flavours being extracted; most cheaper grinders will spit out a wide gamut of particle size.
One of the most important jobs of a barista is to manage the grind fineness to optimise for the beans.
The reason that perfect espresso isn't made by a robot—the reason why the process is so variable—is because the source material (the beans) are volatile. They're constantly changing, each batch is slightly different, their properties change as they off-gas every day from when they're roasted, and they're greatly affected by storage and ambient humidity. Some of these variances can be compensated for by adjusting the grind.
It's not about grinders but it spends a few chapters on how coffee is produced and how different factors/regions can affect its flavor. It's an excellent primer on coffee in general, and of course on roasting at home (though the chapter on machines at the end is a little outdated).
In contrast, consider the Breville espresso machines. They make great coffee reportedly, but I understand they're next to impossible to service or fix yourself. I heard that a technician is required to merely clean it, much less repair it (maybe a machine owner can chime in).
So I guess you gain some and lose some with economies of scale and espresso machines.
I put the cylinder (~= group head) in the water as I bring it it up to temperature, and get extremely consistent results.
I have a PID controlled kettle, and a high end burr grinder. The setup compares favorably with high end manual machines at work.
I usually make two batches (2 double shots) with the flair, fwiw.
More often than not I'll make multiple beverages with it in a row. It's good enough that I'm frankly worried that when I finally upgrade to a proper machine it won't feel worth it. I had been looking forward to getting my fancy espresso machine eventually, so this is weirdly disappointing.
I love espressos, machiattos, lattes and have gotten to the point where I’m consistently producing both espresso and lattes (with art!) that I prefer to many reasonably good coffee shops.
It took me some time to learn the machine and how espresso works, but I got to geek out in the process. Highly recommended for people who are more interested in the journey than the destination.
If you compare it to a regular home coffee machine the Rancilio contains more metal. The portafilter (the thing with the handle that contains the basket where the coffee grinds are put) is the same as their shop grade machines. It's big and heavy and feels solid like it'll last a long time. While if you compare the portafilter of a regular home coffee machine they often feel cheap and flimsy. The switches on the front feel industrial too. With the exception of a few bits (as noted in the article) the exterior is mainly stainless steel. While other home coffee machines at similar price point (and above) are far more plasticy.
The Siliva is often a good introduction for home coffee enthusiasts and hardware hackers alike. They're often recommended on coffee snob forums as a result. They're fairly ubiquitous so getting parts is straight forward. IIRC The manual contains circuit diagrams. It's easy to open and tinker with too. The most common modification is adding a PID controller to regulate the temperature.
The machine itself is straightforward but fills a niche. The next level up of more expensive home enthusiast machines generally cost at least twice the price. The next level up of coffee machine generally includes a PID and often twin boilers, so you can use one boiler for shots and the other boiler to foam milk. While with the Siliva as it's only got a single boiler you have to do your shots first, then switch it over to steam mode.
If you look after Siliva it can last for 10 years or more (I've had mine that long and it's still going on). I really want a duel boiler machine, but I'm trying to figure out which ones are good at the moment.
It'd say a Delonghi with similar specs is aimed at someone more causal. The kind of audience George Clooney is targeting with Nespresso. While the Siliva is not aimed at someone who just wants a coffee. You have to learn how to make decent coffee and for that it needs to be paired with a good grinder.
It does, I bought one (new, latest model) recently and was thrilled to see that. I've bought ~'80s amplifiers on eBay and loved that the manuals have circuit diagrams, and thought it was a lost era.
The Silvia's is far simpler (to state the obvious) but a wonderful inclusion.
Even though it's fairly readily determined, given its simplicity, it'd make me more confident in any repair or modification.
The one I have been thinking of is replacing the pump and reservoir with (a pressure reducing valve and) an electronic valve plumbed in, so that I never have to top-up, or risk the boiler running dry.
Now let's suppose it dies now, it would have cost me 10 euros per year. I would have to keep a Roncilio for 64 years to get the same bang for the buck. I'm starting to think that maybe it's a volume problem, you need to make coffee for at least 10 people daily and then you might see a difference.
Also I think that living in a place where a good espresso costs less than a euro makes it kinda hard to justify a coffee machine that costs almost as much as a used car... :)
Result: Waaaayyyy over the (German) limits for lead in drinking water.
I wanted to sell it but added to the post that I wanted to wait for the results, and that I would scrap it and not sell it if there was lead. There were several people who still wanted to buy it. As someone who has had to have treatment with chelators, albeit against mercury, I have seen what those academic and abstract warnings "there is no amount of lead (or mercury) that does not do damage" mean in practice: With my (university clinic researcher) doctor's consent I continued chelation far beyond any of the "limits" (i.e. when tested levels had fallen below any official limits in urine or blood I still continued, for years). It STILL had an effect, and it was recognizable in objective symptoms, not just subjective ones.
For almost 100% of people the dangers of lead (or heavy metals or environmental poisons in general) are way too abstract to be taken seriously. I've given up - actually I never really seriously tried, and if so only by short comments such as these and never to anyone in person in order to not ruin relationships - to convince anyone. Those poisons don't make you sick in small quantities, they just, very, very gradually, make you function worse. Since this is 100% correlated with aging, since it takes a long time, all those effects will a) be part of your life, you got used to it gradually, b) attributed to age. Only if you do were to do something really extreme such as what I did (had to, was forced to by circumstances) would you be able to see a difference. For what it's worth, my doctor too thinks this is vastly under-recognized and a much bigger problem than even the vast majority of doctors think. The only reason I now it was not "stress" or "age" is because a long list of quite common ailments is completely gone now, from occasional small localized short cramps to psoriasis to warts to only mention three common ones.
I would not buy that machine. There are lead-free alternatives. I have a Vibiemme Domobar (with PID). This particular machine uses copper everywhere, even all the small parts of the E61 brewing group, which I've only ever seen with brass parts everywhere else. I had its water tested too, no lead whatsoever, but elevated copper - which is a non-issue (the body has far better mechanisms to handle copper, since it's an essential metal, reflected in the official limits in drinking water, which are several orders of magnitude higher for copper).
Is this a sensible comparison to make? You will likely be drinking at most 120ml (4 shots) of rancilio espresso per day, which is around 4% of your daily ~3L recommended water intake.
How high were the results, anyway?
There is no such thing as "safe lead exposure limit".
This is a myth. You're supposed to have around 2 l of water, from all sources: meaning that you'd have to eat only freeze-dried food to actually need that much water.
I inherited an early model one from a family and have passed it along after it’s first and only professional service ($30US). It’s made approximately 15k coffees in its time.
My DeLonghi has lasted 8 years so far and I didn't treat it too well. I guess I might not be an enthusiast above the level of Clooney, but this feels to me a lot like bikes and dentists :)
And Niche Zero for grinder.
I'm biased because it's Australian, but I'm in love with the Breville Dual Boiler. The portafilter has non-standard dimensions which vexes me a little, but it pulls phenomenal shots; I've found the quality to be similar to the La Mazzocco GS3, while being literally one tenth the price.
Oh and the steam wand is lovely.
I had a love-hate relationship with it, the group head design was very forgiving, it required almost no technique to pull a very good shot, could be left on for a long time and be instantly ready, powerful steam, heated up fast etc. Really an ideal home machine except for being a total POS.
Every few months when I had to repair it I thought about replacing it but there really wasn't anything out there with the combination of shot quality and ease of use and small kitchen practicality. The E61 machines are large, require good technique, use a lot of water, generate a lot of heat and probably are not that much more reliable as they are also sort of craft workshop built. The Silvia is overrated and very fiddly, it can make great shots, if the stars are just so. Manual levers are fetish objects for collectors, coffee hobbyists, and masochists.
What I really wanted was a modern design built with modern processes, ie a Tesla, not a Fiat 124 Spider from the 60's.
Enter the Breville 920XL dual boiler. It makes better coffee and is even more forgiving and consistent than my old Ponte Vechio. It heats up fast and steams well. I don't love the tamper as much as my old rosewood and brass one for the Ponte Vecchio, but the magnetic tamper holder is one of those tiny details that makes me happy every shot. Two years in it's been perfect, except for just the tiniest steam wand valve leak recently. Time will tell, but since I got it at Costco, I'm out nothing if it's a problem.
The Silvia works perfectly every time. But you need to know something about making coffee i.e. roast, grind, dose, tamp, temperature, time, yield, steam, pour etc.
The Lusso and the Breville will make great shots if your grind and tamp are even close. My wife and child both could regularly make great shots after a few minutes demo with either of those. I do adjust the grinder from time to time as the coffee ages or when we get new beans, but that's it.
I don't think that would be possible with the Silvia.
Professional coffee machines are just tools. It's the barista who takes responsibility for making coffee.
You can get perfect shots every time with the Silvia. It's not difficult. You just need to understand what you're doing.
If you enjoy your Breville though, that's great!
Holy moly $7k?!
Check out the Brewtus (Expobar Minore IV). Double boiler, E61 group head, PID. God shot territory every pull.
It's more like a hobby than just a coffee maker for some people.
I inherited a consumer DeLonghi, that basically looks like most of their espresso machines and it's nothing like a professional machine. They use dual wall instead of single wall filter baskets, the steam wand differs a lot and my machine shoots a couple of jets of water into the coffee, preventing even extraction.
I did however happen to find beans that got decent results on that machine, so it's not like there's a strict total order of quality that leads to a one dimensional result. Professional machines are much more pleasant to work with, though.
It is. A 58mm tamper fits perfectly from memory. The early ones shipped with a weird little aluminium one that should be avoided. All the bits in them are easily replaced. My best upgrade was refitting the mesh screens screw with a nut so that you weren’t trying to unscrew it with a tiny screwdriver, upside down.
Traditionally espresso is extracted with high pressure (9 bar) water. That pressure is build on top of the coffee. When the water passes the coffee and its pressure drops it foams up. This foam is the only way most people can tell they've got an espresso and not some other coffee drink.
To be able to build up 9 bar of pressure the coffee has to be fairly fine ground and, most importantly, fresh. Most people do not want to bother with grinding coffee and buy pre-ground. Pre-ground coffee cannot build enough resistance to create any significant foam. So the appliance-level machines, targeted for pre-ground coffee, come with a valve in the portafilter after the coffee. That valve creates espresso-like foam in the resulting drink, which is not much different from a regularly brewed coffee otherwise. Using these machines with a fresh grind is also problematic - they usually miss overpressure valve before coffee and sport a standard 15-20 bar vibro pump. This results in pressure building up way above 9 bar and fracturing the coffee layer, directing all water through narrow channels and missing most of the grounds.
tl;dr it's pretty hard to make proper espresso with a Delonghi.
Espresso grind is special. It's not just fairly fine grind, it's a mix of fine, moderate and coarse grinds that are packed together. If you are to try and use just an uniformly fine grind for espresso, the machine will have very hard time extracting from it - literally a drop a second instead of a flow.
If this had been true, you could just toss coffee grounds into hot water and it would foam up.
> If you are to try and use just an uniformly fine grind for espresso, the machine will have very hard time extracting from it - literally a drop a second instead of a flow.
Really? Any uniformity in grind will block machine? Could you explain physics behind such phenomenon please?
Jeez, dude... That's EXACTLY what happens. It's called a "bloom". Here, first hit in Google - https://www.roastycoffee.com/coffee-bloom/
>Really? Any uniformity in grind will block machine? Could you explain physics behind such phenomenon please?
Yes, really. Give it a try. Better yet, read a book on a subject. Something like Blue Bottle's intro into coffee making.
I wish there were more resources dedicated to fixing stuff like this because it feels terrible to throw it away and buy a new one (especially when a new one is $1500 or more).
Here is one guide http://coffeetimex.wikidot.com/e61-group-servicing but there are also videos on youtube.
That's my problem. I have a Nuovo Era Cuadra and it was never a very popular machine.
I'm glad the poster enjoyed the project, because there's no way on Earth it was worth the money.
I wouldn’t call the Silva expensive. Probably hard too find something cheaper that feels better, quality wise, than even a Nespresso-machine.
My Silvia paid for itself vs. $5 coffee shop lattes in under a year.
I got a Breville Dual Boiler a few years ago and it was ok if temperamental for 2 years and 4 months. Then it died suddenly.
I had to pay Breville ~$400 for an out of warranty repair and drop it off personally at the local repair centre. The repair took two weeks and it died with the same symptoms a few days after I picked it up.
Breville refused to refund me for the repair attempt and it took escalating to get them to ship me a brand new replacement with 3 to 4 weeks estimated shipping.
I bought a Rocket instead and when the Breville showed up a month later sold it on Craigslist to cover a small portion of the wasted time and money.
The Rocket is much simpler but much more consistent. My wife a chef loves it but hated the Breville.
The Rocket did cost more but with regular home maintenance and an occasional service should last 15 to 20 years.
I've always liked these, but if I were to hack one up, I'd probably want to see if I can achieve higher pressures. It has a really narrow regime of operation, and it doesn't quite achieve a high enough pressure to operate with true espresso fine grind. You have to set it to a slightly coarser grind, and the result is that it makes a fairly weak shot. But it does so with great consistency.
Definitely don't buy the newer Saecos with the BMW design bullshit. They are choc full o' nutty sensors and control circuits that make me very angry. (Too many faulty sensors is a BMW specialty.)
I agree with other poster that if the grind is too fine it doesn't have the pressure to get water through it. To be fair a super fine grind and packing a shot in to the stove top unit also results in a lot of steam coming out the safety pressure release valve.
In case you're in the UK, http://www.myespresso.co.uk. (I bought mine there new, but noticed they sell parts, refurbs, etc.)