So I helped a buddy of mine here (a friend from work) that had picked up a sorta-working Silvia off of Craigslist awhile back. A new pump and replacement steam line got it back to working proper.
He recently wanted to do some upgrades, namely a PID like mine, plus a pressure gage and some lighting. I have never regretted doing the PID mod on mine way back when, made for an excellent machine for what I paid (mine is an early one, from around the second year of production).
Anyway, the mods went well, and got me off my ass to add a pressure gage and lighting to mine as well.
Parts were not very expensive, and the installation went well for the most part.
The hardest thing about the upgrade was mine, being an older model, was plumbed with
metric Teflon tubing and compression fittings (helps prevent vibration transmitted through the machine from the vibe pump). The newer machines use braided hoses similar to what you'd find under the kitchen sink.
I decided to keep with the theme, and used Sharkbite fittings for the tubing. The issue was Teflon tubing isn't very common (especially
metric Teflon tubing), so I tried using readily-available Polyethylene first. It worked for awhile, but the heat and constant pressure eventually caused a failure, and a hose blew off one time as I was steaming some milk. Ugh.
I eventually sourced some standard-sized Teflon tubing from a commercial supplier here in the USA, but they only sold it in 100' lengths, and it wasn't cheap. A few back-and-forth emails later, and I had purchased a "sample" length of a few feet for less than $20 shipped to my door.
The ID was very near the correct size as the original 6mm tubing, and as a bonus, the OD on this stuff (which could be had in 1/32" incremental OD/ID sizes) was the proper SAE size for the Sharkbite fittings. So far, so good! It's held up fine after several months of use.
Putting the pressure gage into the frame of the machine is a one-way mod. You have to
cut a hole in the SS body. NO going back, lol!
A good hole saw (Milwaukee) worked fine. I used some big bar clamps and put a piece of wood on the backside of the front panel, so I could drill/cut the hole in place without fully disassembling/removing the front panel. But the main power switch and power light had to come out temporarily. It went well.
While I was at it ordering some parts, I went ahead and got a silicone portafilter gasket and a new, one-piece shower screen. No more trapped coffee particles in the screen, and an easier, better seal on the coffee baskets.
Here you can see I added the lighting. These are COB LED strips, which I scavenged from
a cheap Harbor Frieght light. $2 for the light strips versus ~$10-$15 if ordered elsewhere online, lol.
They claim 200 Lumens (100 per strip), but they're not quite that much. Maybe 75 Lumens each, but that's plenty. I used some Teflon-insulated wiring, which lasts a long time and is mostly impervious to heat below ~400º. Perfect for this application.
Voila!
Here you can see the guts in the back of the machine. The Sharkbite splitter, and the lower tube going to the pressure gage, which also has a Sharkbite fitting. The brass compression fittings are original to the machine. There is a stainless steel cover that goes over all of this, and there's potential for the high-pressure supply tube to rub at the bottom of it, so I split another length of tubing to put over the main one, to hopefully prevent any rub-through of the water line.
The LED driver module is on the left. I attached it (and the LED strips) with some 3M high-strength adhesive foam double-sided tape. I've used the stuff in a lot of other applications, and it works well. Doesn't come off until you purposely take it off. Recommended!
It gets power straight from the main power switch, and then is directly wired to the two LED strips (they're wired in series to achieve the proper forward voltage and to get the correct amperage to each, since it's a constant current LED driver), so the lights come on as soon as you turn the machine on.
All done!
All powered up. The lighting proved to be about perfect. Not too bright, not too dim. Shown below in the evening with the kitchen lights on.
Another shot the following morning. No kitchen lights on, just the morning daylight coming through the windows. This is where I've especially come to appreciate this lighting mod! No need to turn on the bright lights first thing in the morning.
It's just the right amount of light to make your coffee before facing what the day has in store.
The pressure gage is nice too. Way back when, I built a pressure gage that I could attach to my portafilter, in order to calibrate the pressure of the machine through the back flow valve. It should be right about at 9 Bar. Lo and behold, after all these years, it's still perfect!
I do appreciate being able to see how the shot is progressing now though. The gage is giving me pressure feedback to confirm what I'm seeing in a given shot. It's really only confirming what I've always suspected, but that little bit of extra feedback has helped me tighten up my shots a bit more.
Sorry for the long read if you made it this far!
I'm pretty stoked, the machine is now
perfect IMO!
(At least however perfect a single-boiler machine could be...)
