Pulled a ~ 600 € DeLonghi coffee maker out of the dumpster and invested about 50 € in spare parts (water tank, grounds container, and a new magnet valve). Seems like I have a new coffee machine now 😁☕
(It would have gone even faster and without a puddle on the kitchen counter if I had put in the gaskets from the start. 🤦 Ah well.)
/cc @coffee
Is it just me or should the insides of a coffee maker not look like the exposed workings of a jet engine
Tbf this is a relatively fancy espresso maker.
Looks like a “super automatic” espresso machine.
It grinds the whole beans and typically they also have a doser (measures the weight or quantity of the ground up coffee beans), then it tamps the grounds, brews the coffee (which is some at a specific temperature and pressure), then ejects the used up coffee puck in a bin in the bottom of the machine.
The mechanism for the automatic tamping, brewing (with pressure valve) and ejection is one very complicated piece as well as the controls for the motor that operates it. Then there’s the temperature and pressure controls for both the brewing of the coffee and the milk frother the machine likely has.
Edit: Video with partial teardown and which shows how the internals operate
I recently replaced the heating element in my delonghi coffee machine, and was also surprised to see how wild it was inside
What do you do for a living and how do you know how to fix coffee makers?
@workerONE Officially, I’m a computer scientist 😉 But over the years, I’ve fiddled around with enough electronics and mechanical engineering as well that I’m overall pretty good at fixing stuff 🤷
Just remember, if she doesn’t find you handsome at least she finds you handy.
Way to go!! I didn’t realize these were so fixable but not surprising. My old Gaggia was easy to find parts for and easy to work on.
@agent_flounder Yes, big kudos to DeLonghi as well. They could just have glued everything together into one big epoxy block, but no, they chose to make it actually repairable (and even let you buy replacement parts). 👌
I think they make too much money repairing complex coffee machines to make it difficult
Also unlike phones they don’t need to make them small as possible and able to survive being carried all day, so don’t have those reasons for making things tight and sealed
