Gaggia Cubika Freecycle find

[carreauchompeur]

Folks,

Picked this beauty up today after seeing an advert on Freecycle.

Described fault is "t works occasionally but often it just won't put through any water. Also it has got slower and slower at heating up, so I suspect the heating mechanism(s) is knackered. It probably also needs a good descaling."

Wonder if a good descale will do the trick...

Watch this space. I love bargains, and free bargains are the best!

[carreauchompeur]

Great, sounds promising photos will be furnished, I'm intending this to become the office machine.

Lovely build quality for a 'budget' machine. Very solid.

[carreauchompeur]

All sorted!

It actually seems to work fine now with minimal intervention.

Cleaned everything up, the water tank and hoses were particularly grim. I found one of the main problems straight away, a badly clogged group head:



I had to run a lot of descaler and then water through, took ages until it ran clear. And a quick polish later:



Taking it to work later for the benefit of the office as my Jura is still doing a sterling job at home!

[carreauchompeur]

Definitely.

For all of the (admittedly hilarious) tales you hear about Freecycle freeloaders, actually I really like the concept and have started to use it a lot more. It's satisfying bringing something like this back to life. I may keep an eye on eBay for other broken ones as the pump looks very simple to change...

[carreauchompeur]

I was a bit hasty.... Now the pump doesn't seem to come on. Will be taking my tools into work to see what's up, it's either one of the pipes gummed up or a cutout. Definitely still heats up though which is good. No doubt one of my monkey colleagues has just run it dry or something!

[carreauchompeur]

No joy yet. A colleague mentioned it smelling something like a clutch when someone was making a coffee so I suspect they ran the pump dry. Need to remember to take some tools into work when I go next.