I received my first lot of goods from Orphan Espresso today including some of the pliars that aid in removing the lever pin clips so I dismantled cleaned and rebuilt the group tonight, replacing all the seals. Considering the last set of seals went in around 2007 they were still in very good condition. I used very fine steel wool to clean out the pistion cylinder and now have no more seazing on the lever movement. Next up on the agenda is to sand back and repaint the frame and outer case on the weekend, get out the dremel to clean all bolts, caps etc and spend some time prepping the base plate and boiler for installation of the gasket. Not sure how "clean" these two parts will need to be but wll do the best I can. The old gasket was a pain in the rear to remove and still some miniscule remnants there... I had ended up using 60 grit sand paper to remove the dreggs and will probably go through a progression of 12, 240, 400, 800 before the gasket goes in. This '74 model requires the boiler to be removed from the frame completely to get access to one of the nuts on the base plate so I want to get it right the first time. I need to source a strain relief plug for the power cord but they are "unobtainium" according to OE. Mine is not coimpletely trashed but had a very small piece broken off before I removed it and apparently putting them back in is harder than getting them out. Anyway, I'll upload some pics tomorrow of the work I have done... And, one question re my DMM. I have the CS DMM that I use for roast monitoring, and want to test the element before putting it all back together but I have never used a MM before.... So, if I set it to Ohm's and put one lead on each terminal of the element, what sort of readout should I expect? Pretty sure mine is 49.5 or thereabouts...
