Francis Francis! X1 Dissection

FF! X1 unpacked, looks great. Shame it doesn't go... (yet)

The front unscrews with 2 screws, the steam knob comes off by unscrewing a (slotted) screw underneath the steam valve (there is an access hole next to the steam arm nut) and then simply unwinding the valve assembly until it comes out. 4 more screws from underneath and the whole top comes off. Talk about easy access!

In the next photo you can see the burn marks where the electronic temperature controller gave up. The board had been removed, and a number of wires removed, so obviously a repair/investigation has been attempted. The red thing is the ULKA vibe pump.

Thermal fuse. Bang. Anyway, this is what a blown thermal fuse looks like. They are usually mounted on top of the boiler, so that if the thermostat fails, they act as a last line of defense and blow before the element is burnt out/house catches fire. When the temperature controller board expired, it must have done so in a way that kept the element on - and the thermal fuse did its job. The thermal fuse is placed first in the phase line, so nothing will work when it blows. If you have a completely dead machine, it is possible that this simple and replaceable fuse is the cause. Of course work out why it blew before you replace it, or buy 2 incase you don't know why - they do blow sometimes with no clear long-term fault.

The 'sensor' for the front panel capillary temperature gauge. It is recessed into a well at the edge of the boiler - it probably does quite a good job of measuring the actual boiler temperature.

This is the output of the ULKA vibe pump. The metal union directs water into the boiler. The plastic pipe exiting at the top returns water to the tank. I have seen it described as a air bleed/release valve to help the vibe pump prime. A lot of CoffeeGeeks adjust the OPV to get a brew pressure of about 8bar. Some machines like the V3 Rancilio Silva have adjustable ones from the factory. The Nemox one was also adjustable, I don't believe this one (or the one in the X3 - which is the same) acts as an OPV or is adjustable. I'll be using the one from the Nemox.

A very simple and easily removed steam valve assembly. Nothing much to say here.

The boiler is held in by 4 screws that go through the chassis and into the group head assembly. If you look closely you will see something very wrong in this photo....

Another bad thing in this photo... Essentially, you can see the brown spot and particularly in the previous photo you can see white oxide from where water has seeped out. Yep - the boiler is perforated... Damn. I haven't included the photo yet, but the pitting from the inside is too extensive to be repaired.

And inside. Pretty nasty in there. Descale, descale... This machine will be rebuilt, but not with FF! parts. Not sure what I will do for a boiler, I am still thinking through options. The Nemox one will fit - but we'll see - I don't like the dispersion screen setup and would prefer brass over stainless steel. As for the temperature controller - I might either just go for a twin thermal button setup as in the Nemox (no electronics) or a cheap PID from Hong Kong Ebay.

A bare chassis. This machine is actually very nice to work on. The access is great, the parts well put together with quality connectors. Shame they used aluminium instead of brass - thankfully they recognised their mistake by the time they made my X3.

I guess the question is what I will end up doing to redeem this lovely machine.

One last comment. Contrary to all the other designs I have seen, the cold water enters at the top of the FF! X1 boiler. I wonder if this was a major reason the original X1 didn't make great coffee. In every machine I have seen, water for brewing exits the boiler via a long copper pipe that draws water from the top of the boiler where it is hottest. When water enters at the side near the bottom, as in the Gaggias, the Nemox and X3 amongst many others, the mixing of cold and hot is delayed, and the new cold water has to pass via the element to the exit pipe. For the older X1 this is not the case, and cold water seems to be able to freely mix with the hot water at the top of the boiler before it is pushed through the copper exit pipe. This would explain the many comments/complaints I have seen about the thermal brew stability of the older X1 machines. Something I will avoid, after all, the whole point of a saturated group head is to achieve thermal stability - why mess it up like that?