So.. I got to be the proud owner of a Francis Francis X1.

For some time now I have been wondering about getting an espresso machine. This is how faith turned one in my direction. A blue one.

Within a simple phonecall I was offered one. Sure, it leaked a little. And he had tried to change the gaskets but it still leaked. If I was interested I could have it… else it would have to go.

I said yes. But it wasn’t the gaskets leaking.
This is how it looked when I opened it.

I don’t know wether it had frozen or simply blown up. A friend of mine had three… they all blew up. Maybe I understand why now.

After a fair bit of examination I had an idea of how it worked. Power, heat, pump and steam. Strange design. A bit stupid. Switching of the electric control to make steam. Why? Of course they blow up in the end. Well, here is what was broken.
uMust have made quite a bang.

Being such an time optimist I thought that maybe two afternoons would be suficcient to make the spare part. Well I can tell you it was not. In the end I did track a seller that could get the part for me. El & Digital Service on Ringvägen. Great attitude on the guy there. Will sure buy something from them in the end but this time I was far too deep into progression.

This is how my part looked after, say, ten hours.
And I haven’t even soldered the threads. The man at the shop said they where N8 threads by the way.

Lucky for me my father is a guru with metal. His skills in soldering comes from a life working with metal. And in the end I did come up with a part that fitted and didn’t leak.
While I was at it I changed the way the boiler heats up to make steam. Like I said in the beginning, the original attitude is to switch off the electronic regulator and let a mechanic thermostat control the heat for steam. Everyone knows that a bimetallic thermostat has a lifespan on say 30K to 100K on-offs. And they degrade before they die. So if the Francis Francis is left on in steam mode for a while… kaboom.

Lucky for me there is a very easy solution to work around that. Just add a resistor of 1.5K in series with the NTC resistor measuring the brew temperature. I disconnected the “steam cables” isolated them and tucked them away inside the FF. Then i routed some cables holding the 1.5K resistor and used the steam switch to shunt in and out that resistor. In that way the functionality of the sexy switches on the front is preserved (oh yeah… you have to turn the steam switch upside down) but when engaging the steam switch the NTC resistor will “lie” about 15 °C to the controller and keep the heat at about 110 °C instead of 93 °C. This is not yet done in the photo above.
To me it is a mystery why the engineers that designed the FF didn’t think of that in the first place.

Here she is with the hood back on. It is true what you can read on the internet about the Francis Francis X1. They make excellent coffee while they are alive. And they seem to leave us with a boom!