This Fixit Clinic occurred at the Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale.

The first item was a Saeco Vienna Plus espresso machine. It automated the entire brewing process, including grinding and measuring the coffee, dispensing it into the “brew group” (the removable assembly where the actual brewing takes place), tamping it down, forcing water through the grounds, and ejecting the puck.

Essentially, it worked as follows:

• A burr grinder both ground the coffee and pushed it into the dispenser.
• The dispenser was a small chamber with a trapdoor in the bottom to release the coffee into the brew group, and one movable wall. Shifting the movable wall in and out by way of a rack (on the wall) and pinion (connected to a knob) changed the dispenser’s capacity, allowing coffee to be metered with some accuracy. When the dispenser was full, it would cause the movable wall to bulge out slightly, pushing a microswitch to tell the machine to stop the grinder and open the trapdoor.
• The brew group contained the mechanism for tamping the grounds, brewing the coffee, and ejecting the puck. I didn’t take it apart, so that’s all I know.
• After leaving the brew group, the coffee was funneled down into the cup through some height-adjustable nozzles, supposedly to limit heat loss.
• There was also a steam wand/hot water dispenser on the side.

The owner said that it wasn’t dispensing coffee into the brew group, though it seemed to work fine when we tried it. They mentioned that they’d tried to clean out the coffee dispenser, so we inspected it and found it fairly clogged with slightly damp coffee grounds. Attempts to loosen it with fingers and small screwdrivers failed, so we decided to take it apart.

I don’t have any pictures, but we disassembled the machine following some online videos, removing the grinder cover and the outer (static) grinding element. This allowed easy access of the clogged passage connecting grinder and dispenser chamber, which we cleaned with an electrical “dust blower” (a substitute for compressed air liquefied refrigerant). Reassembly was fairly straightforward, though we did have to calibrate the grinder consistency; the adjustment knob could only adjust across a portion of the grinder’s full range, so we had to set it at the most useful range for espresso brewing.

Finally, the power button was loose. To my surprise (but not the client’s), there was a model of it on Thingiverse, so I decided to 3D print it on one of the Maker Nexus 3D printers; the whole process was very smooth. The client declined to give the recommended donation of $2 per 100 g filament expended, amounting to about 1¢ for the 5 g of filament used.

Next, someone brought in a fan that drawing power but wouldn’t run. Recalling from a much earlier fix that the bushings might just be dry, we removed the fan blades and cage, and lubricated the front bearing, which seemed to make the motor spin much more smoothly. I also wanted to remove the motor housing to lubricate the rear bushing, but we couldn’t get the oscillator knob off, so we gave up. Anyhow, the fan seemed to spin just fine after lubrication. Since the motor was (probably) a shaded-pole motor with low starting torque, I’d assume that the friction in the bushings simply prevented the motor from starting properly. After oiling them, the fan ran just fine, though it did fail to start in one trial.

For some reason, the plastic nut holding on the fan blades was completely stripped. Replacing it with a readily-available nut from Maker Nexus’ stock was impossible because it had a left-handed thread. After briefly considering 3D-printing one, we found that the nuts were easily and cheaply available online, so we just advised the owner to buy one.

The same guy also had a computer that wouldn’t boot after he tried to install Kubuntu on it. After booting it with a recovery disk and checking the disk for corruption but finding no errors, we simply made a new Kubuntu installer disk and re-installed it with success. I suppose this is what IT support does.