Well, I managed to fix the second major headache in my quest to revive Miss Silvia (a 2006 Rancilio Silvia). If you don’t remember, this was my boneheaded over-tightening of the high-temperature thermostat. It resulted in breaking the shaft of it…the part that screwed into the boiler.
I had a couple of options: buy a replacement boiler (to the tune of way too much money…), try extracting the screw using any means available, or jury-rig something.
Since the high-temperature thermostat essentially prevents the machine from turning into a bomb if it gets too hot (steam under pressure can be a dangerous thing), I wanted to do my best to extract the broken screw and replace it with a new high-temperature thermostat. So, I ordered the new thermostat and and a set of micro screw extractors:
The biggest screw extractor in the set did the trick:
