I have an old espresso machine that suddenly stopped working. I took the covers off and the main design consists of the water boiling chamber and a hydraulic piston that compresses the ground beans. These are working against each other to hold the pressure for the coffee making process. I ran the machine without the covers on to get an idea of what was failing. It turns out that the piston apparently wasn't able to hold against the pressure of the boiling water being forced through the grounds. This means that the piston slowly get's pushed up and for larger amounts of coffee it get's pushed out of the cup and breaks the seal spilling hot coffee everywhere. I took apart the entire piston assembly and greased up all the o-rings and such with some silicone grease, but to no avail. The machine now pumps the piston down, but it doesn't seem to stop it. Either there's some kind of sensor that's not detecting that it's in the correct position, or it's leaking more than before and unable to work up the pressure required. The idea was to take it all apart again tonight or tomorrow and have a look, possibly trying to apply more grease. But I wanted to check by here to see if anyone had experience on this kind of stuff. Is it possible to over-grease for example? Should I use something else than the silicon grease I got? I tried to find something that was relatively food-safe in case I managed to get something on the coffee making parts of the machine. This video show the helper piston and how it's assembled (this is what I used to disassemble it). The machine in question is a Krups EA8000.Any help appreciated! via /r/DIY http://ift.tt/2De6m7V
