I’ve always liked to take things apart and see how they work. (Yes, I’m a dork.) I’ve pried apart a computer, a VCR, a TV, and, once, a whole washing machine, among lots of other smaller items. I’m not trying to fix them, just to see what the inside looks like, and how they work. Weird, I know, but the point is that I get a kick out of opening up machines and seeing their guts, and I’m not afraid to pull something apart. Which comes in handy when the office espresso machine goes bust.

It’s a nice one, with lots of shiny chrome and stainless steel, and shipping it off to a repair shop would have cost a fortune (above and beyond the cost of the repair itself). So another interested co-worker and myself opened it up, found the problem and fixed it. For a while, and then it broke again.

We cracked it open and diagnosed a faulty pressurestat and a blown heating element. The heating element in particular is a fairly serious part (1400W of power!) It screws into the boiler with a 30mm wrench, and when we tried to unscrew it, we could not budge it. The boiler isn’t really attached to the frame of the machine. Instead it hangs off a tangle of copper pipes. (The heating element is the large hex-shaped piece in the picture below.)

Watching the guts of the machine flex as I torqued the heating element made us all very nervous. There’s nothing worse than creating two problems while trying to fix one, and the last thing we wanted to do was bend or break some crucial part. So we took the whole boiler out. (Sorry about the picture quality, all I had was my camera phone.)

It was still a bit of a struggle, but eventually we did manage to remove the heating element. Now we can install the new parts, reassemble the machine, and then, hopefully, start pulling shots again. After climbing a slope of increasing frustration: i) a bad pressurestat; ii) broken heating element; iii) heating element can’t be removed; iv) boiler has to be removed; we finally seem to be on the downslope. Wish us luck.