Frustration with El Espresso Machine

For a while now I’ve been meaning to descale my espresso machine and I’ve been faffing around trying to find the Approved(tm) descaler tablets. Sparky’s Small Appliance Repair at Toowong shut down, and their Albion store isn’t open on Fridays or weekends, weirdly. It turns out that you can use a tartaric acid solution, easily created by dumping a heaped tablespoon of cream of tartar into a full water reservoir and stirring.

So this afternoon I finally got around to actually doing the descaling. It seemed to work very well, especially after enough scale was removed from the boiler to make the steam wand go BLAM. Lots of steam came through the wand after that point, and the group head’s flow rate accelerated mightily also.

It was with great, great annoyance then that I found I was unable to re-install the screw which holds the filter cap on the brewing head. No amount of exerting pressure has been sufficient to get the screw to take to the threads in the block, so at this stage I am totally unable to get espresso.

I will have to make some calls in the morning, I guess. Sigh. At least I’ve got a plunger/French press to help tide me over.