Why we refurbish historical coffee machines
Refurbishment is not that difficult for our specialists. But it is an incredible time consuming, everything takes a long time, everything you have to take care of, you have to be incredibly thorough, sometimes you make spare parts yourself, it is really challenging work, but at the end, you are delighted. When we see an old-timer coffee machine which was lying in a dust weeks ago, with a rusting heart, now standing as a knight in shining armour, there comes the feeling of satisfaction.
In the beginning, we started because of the pure love of coffee and café technology. It is natural that when you adore something, and it’s more than a job for you, you want to know as much as possible about it. And history can give you more than the present. Old technology tells you about the life of coffee lovers 30, 40, 50 years ago, and that’s why it’s better than a modern coffee machine.
The more historical machines passed through our hands, the better was the result. Some coffee machines even looked so good that clients with a spark in their eyes said: “We have to have one of these in our house. And if not, at least similar”. That’s why old-fashioned coffee machines can also be found in hotels, cafes and restaurants, such as our beautiful Victoria Arduino Venus Bar with an eagle decoration on the top at the café at Orlová Castle.
Where we started looking for historical coffee machines
Looking for Italian old-timer coffee machines in Slovakia would probably not bring us much success. So we decided to go straight to the source, but without the net and the Italian clutch, there was a difficult task: how, where, from who, how much? However, simple solutions are often the most effective: we started to look for the Italian equivalent of E-bay. We focused on brands such as Victoria Arduino, Faema and Gaggia.
When we saw the first search results, we couldn’t believe it. Where others saw old junk, we saw a real treasure. But communicating with Italians in English or German is not quite easy, especially when you want to do business with them. So we started looking for a man who would agree with the locals and at the same time understand us. We found a Slovak guy named Lucciano, who helped us. Suddenly we had dozens of historical coffee machines in-store, and the question was: “Well, what about them?”
When we work on something, we do it right
We only had experience with newer models, and for us, the refurbishment of old-timer coffee machines was a big unknown. And at the same time a great challenge we enjoyed. The engines were in most cases in terrible condition- rusted, calcified, clogged, broken electrics. We thought that if we wanted to do that, we do it properly. We found a new employee who specializes only in historical coffee machines and, like us, also learned on the go.
We started by completely disassembling the coffee machine, cleaning it, finding out what needs to be replaced, what works, and what doesn’t. Because finding a spare part for a device that was made decades ago is not as easy as buying a smartphone charger and it is followed by hours of polishing, welding, soldering and other ant work. We spent about 200 hours working with one coffee machine, but the result we saw told us that it was a significant investment. We consider the refurbishment of an old-timer coffee machine to be a kind of repayment of our debt to the world of coffee, but at the same time we hope that we will never stop repaying this “mortgage”.
This article was created as an introduction to the series, in which we will describe in detail how the refurbishment of individual coffee machines looks. You can look forward to the devices such as Victoria Arduino – Venus Bar, Gaggia – America and Faema – Lambro. If you have the same enthusiasm for historical coffee machines as we do, do not miss the following articles on our blog. If there is a similar machine on your attic or in the garage and you do not know what to do with it, please contact us.
