Making An Espresso ... Pot!

[Applause] [Music] so I'm slowly cleaning up all the wood that's still left in the garage sawdust sure has a way of getting just about everywhere and you know would really hit the spot right now a segue I meant to say an espresso problem is I don't have an espresso maker like Moka pot so I'm gonna have to make one this nice good job here let me draw a picture of what I'm talking about though I'm sure you probably know exactly what I mean basically something like this but cooler way cooler and by cooler I mean cylindrical let's have a quick look at the parts and how it's supposed to work I'll basically be making four pieces the boiler where the water goes the pot at the top where the coffee collects some sort of a lid and most likely a handle the other parts I need we'll get into in a minute but I just bought them basically the funnel the filter a gasket and a safety valve pressure reliefs essentially you put water in the bottom and ground coffee in the funnel screw the parts together and pressure on a gasket forms the seal between the two then you light her up as the water heats up and comes to a boil the water vaporizes and steam builds pressure that pressure build up in the sealed boiler pushes down on the hot water and the only place it can go is up the funnel and through the coffee grounds that upward pressure compacts the coffee a bit basically tamping it which in turn drives pressure up just a little bit higher finally the brewed coffee pushes up through that filter into the center column and spills over into the top chamber into the coffee pot I think I can get the whole thing out of this piece of aluminum this is a little over three inches by six inches it's 80 by 150 millimeters I plan to make a 4 cup Moka pot you know there's me my wife and my two young children I'm hoping I can get all the parts out of here I think I can definitely get the boiler and the top chamber out of here I'll split these into and these are the two parts that thread together I'm not sure if I'll be able to get a lid out of this and that's why I've the extra chunk of aluminum back there I think this will mostly be lathe work there may be some milling to rough out the chamber at the top I haven't completely thought this through but I'm probably going to do some welding to build up basically a spout that the coffee pours out of and depending how I'm feeling I may see and see the lid and maybe the handle now these are the parts that I purchased I've got a funnel this is where the coffee goes a little pressure relief valve for the boiler section the filter and a gasket now I did consider it making all of these parts but I opted to buy them for two reasons mostly first these are the kind of parts that aren't very conducive to like a home shop built this for example is a deep-drawn aluminum part basically I have a big thin sheet of aluminum and it goes through a write like some kind of a progressive die that stamps and deep draws them and trims them and spits these out by the millions second these things are consumables so sooner or later I'd have to throw them away and I guess make new ones if I wanted to keep drinking espresso so it made sense to just buy them and build the whole thing to standard sizes first thing I need to do is cut off a piece that will become the boiler I've already got that marked out if anybody's got any brilliant ideas on how I should do this just let me know you know optimist that's probably the first smart thing I've heard you say all day I'd be hard-pressed to give you an explanation but these sort of thin walled parts have always made me nervous when all said and done this thing will have about an eighth of an inch wall thickness all around and although working to a dimension is working to a dimension I don't know for some reason they just spook me like I'm always worried I'm going to end up breaking through the part and scrapping it the machine's features you see on the front are remnants from whatever I cut out of this the last time but I'm going to have to bore this out and reduce the diameter at the top so everything fit here and I get the recoup about an inch of material I might have otherwise lost now the first thing I'd like to do here is clean up these cuts from the energon saw just so I have solid dimensions I can reference when I'm boring down into the part the boron mold will become this threaded end should be a nice slip fit with the funnel this filter body so I'm going to do that sighs bore almost all the way to depth once I have that that will remove the bulk of the material and I can start to work on the undercut sort of cut radially to get to my wall thickness [Music] I've used gauge blocks to set a carriage stop here on the bed of my lathe has a bit of an insurance policy to make sure I don't break through the bottom there don't go too deep as long as I don't touch the hand wheel on the top slide this carriage stop should keep me from scrapping the part at least actually so I'm within about five foul of Finnish dimension radially it's ten down the diameter before I take this too far or thin this out too much I'd like to do some work on the outside take this to finish dimension and generally clean it up a bit and then come back to finish the inside and cut the threads if I were to finish this side I wouldn't have that much wall thickness left to really get a good reliable hold to work the other side [Music] Oh [Music] I've opted for a 10 TPI thread that's two and a half millimeter pitch and really for no particular reason it seemed to be sort of like the Goldilocks size on this diameter and length that I have not too fine not too coarse I apologize if they're a little too hard to see shiny aluminum is tough to film and that's the main reason why I don't like to cut perfectly smooth polish thread one more thing I'd like through here is get rid of the partial thread again it's probably impossible to see but if you've cut any threads or if you've even cut a bolt or a piece of all thread in half you'll be familiar with the partial thread that you get so down here it's just a very sharp wisp it starts to fully develop as the thread moves into the material until you get to about here ish and there's a fully developed thread what I'd like to do is remove all of the partial thread because it's a fine pitch on a large diameter that ill form thread you know you can see goes most of the way around I'm going to use my tool post mounted die grinder it's got a six millimeter two-fluid end mill in it to cut what's referred to as a blunt start to the thread I think this is sometimes called a hit B cut or a hit B thread I think it's used a lot in like pipe couplings and stuff that's handled often it makes her a thread that's easier to start and I suppose not as dangerous prone to cutting the lathe is still basically set up to cut threads I'm going to work manually here with the half nut engaged so I'm going to turn the Chuck by hand and that's going to advance the carriage and the die grinder at the same pitch as this thread and I should be able to mill off essentially this helical path [Music] [Music] so hopefully you can see this all of the partial threads been milled away and it starts right there this is essentially what you see on the end of like a garden hose anyway I think that will work for the thread all that's left to do on this part is clean up the inside so you know like when you're sitting in your car waiting at a stoplight and thinking through all the steps you're going to have to go through to make an espresso pot yeah I didn't expect this one to be so tedious the good news is I didn't break through the bottom or the side turns out that I don't have the right style boring bar to easily come in and undercut the backside so I do a lot of screwing around with Ben in the tool post and rotating the tool but it's done I also cut the recess where the funnel fits it obviously doesn't go that way but when you flip it the little flange on the end is almost flush with the top the only thing this is missing now is a drilled and tapped hole for the pressure relief I've already squared up the stock that will become the upper chamber I Center drilled it follow that with a bit of a pilot hole maybe about an inch deep just enough to get in a larger drill bit to get me a starter hole so I can start to bore this end out so the features that go into the bottom part of the upper chamber are probably the trickiest of this whole build so try not screw them up which off the board open to size so I can cut the internal threads that receive the boiler there are also a couple of features that locate the filter up at the top of those threads and a couple of features for the seal the seal is undercut under the threads and it locks a filter in place filter actually goes this one I think all of this needs to happen at the correct depth so that when you screw the two parts together you get adequate compression on the seal and the two halves the aluminum parts don't bottom out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the next big step here would be to rough out the top sort of the coffeepot where the coffee collects now if you recall that's got sort of a protrusion in the center like a centered column that the coffee percolates out of I don't have the right tools to be able to cut out sort of that annular groove on the lathe I don't even know if such tools exist I've got to go pretty deep so my plan is to mill it out with the rotary table and then come back and just clean it up with a boring bar before I can do that I want to build up some material for a spout and put on some type of attachment for a handle let's head over to the router come on man my graduate that cluttered [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] there is my handle there is my spouse much too hot to touch it must be a million degrees if you think it looks bad now you just wait till we're finished I'm going to set up the mill while I let this cool down and then we'll come back and talk about what happened here so I hope what you just saw me do with all the welding and stuff is relatively self-explanatory I put the handle on and then started to build up this spout I used a small piece of I think this is bronze as a dam to help build that up the aluminum weld won't stick to the bronze so it gives me sort of a wall to work up against I then just flipped it up took the bronze away and built up any places that looked a little bit low hopefully after machining we don't have any low spots I have the rotary table with the three jaw Chuck mounted on the mill it's centered and zeroed on the Dro now my stack up here is a little bit tight I can't get in here with a long enough end mill to be able to get all the way to the bottom so I'm going to have to do this in a couple of steps get down as far as I can with a shorter end mill and then swap those out until I reach the depth that I need again the whole point of this is to hollow this top chamber out and still leave a center column for that coffee to come up through [Applause] so that was about as far as I could get down with this end mill that's about an inch deep and I whitened it up a bit before I go any further while I still have some wall thickness and heft to this part I'm going to try to clean up this spout as best I can I mean in the end this old need some hand work with files and some paper probably but I'd like to get consistent as possible right off the mill [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you know I think demosthenes put it best when he said he cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry for whatever a man's actions are such must be his spirit so I'm going to finish this in the lathe all right so that cleaned up pretty good bar it's gotten a lot lighter I basically just cleaned up the ID took it the wall thickness and cleaned up sort of the center column and while I was here I just cut a lap joint at the top that the lid will be able to key in to head back over to the mill [Applause] I went in with a ball end mil and roughed out the inside of that spout that's going to need some hand work with a file to sort of blend all those surfaces and but it blew out bulk and material I then came in and put in a couple of undercuts at the top of the center column where the coffee comes out there's two 180 degrees apart and I essentially just went in and undercut that give me a flat for a starter hole and drilled that through ideally these would probably be undercuts so that the coffee sort of jets out down into the chamber instead of up at you if you have the lid open but I'm hoping the edge of that undercut is deep enough where the coffee might hit that and sort of at least come out horizontally if not spray straight down be honest I'm not too worried about it now the size of that hole was also quite arbitrary it looked about right I think it's about an eighth of an inch three millimeters or so I'm sure that a size a head hole has some effect on the pressure balance and consequently how the espresso tastes because of course it would nothing quite says professional like filming your own screen so I've got a blank for a lid modeled in SolidWorks it's really just the major contour with features to attach the lid a little something to cover the spout and primarily the lap joint that goes around the bottom maybe a cross-section gives you a better sense of what this part will look like now I have a piece of aluminum just from the scrap bin that I think I can get this lid out of and you know it's just sort of cut off from whatever it used to be it's not square it's got some holes in it but it sort of would fit here in the middle the one thing I really like about these cam programs at least HSM Express and fusion those are really the only tool I have available to me is that you can you know model the stock directly into the CAD file that lets me place the lid so I avoid any defect in the raw stock [Music] so you're looking at more or less all of the parts here three parts I made some changes to the lid after it came off the CNC machine at the part just felt a little heavy so I opened up the internal diameter thinned it up a bit at the top I decided in like the spout cover so I took that off and I think you just saw me mill a fill it like a radius on this top edge you no I'm not quite sure what this reminds me of like early 80s maybe or is it older than that only thing I'm missing now is this little pressure relief I've sort of waited to the end because I wanted to see how these two screwed together we're sort of they stopped when they were completely bottomed out I'm going to put this I don't know about there I'm just thinking if that really were to blow it would happen while it's on the fire and hot steams coming out and so probably don't want it pointing back towards the handle or completely overthinking it in terms of the height I want to keep this above the water line on the inside the water line happens about a quarter inch or so below that mark there if this thing were to blow I assume it's better to have water vapor coming out of there instead of a stream of boiling hot water so I'm going to use just the starter tap this set of a two piece set there's sort of the start and the finish tab I'm going to try not to go to fully developed threads because this needs to seal I'm hoping that I can use the valve to sort of help form the final threads they say that in air quotes I'm not sure if it's going to pull that off or not so down just until the first few fully developed threads are in the material the last couple of turns I don't think are fully fully formed alright so hopefully that doesn't leak so I've got some water in there just shy of that pressure relief valve it's going to add some coffee and I'll freak out I've already washed this thing like five times and have run hot water through it you know a truth be told I'm not even that big of an espresso fan and I certainly enjoy a good espresso but you know what this channels got a reputation to maintain [Music] so I don't see any aluminum chips in there that's probably a good first sign and it tastes like espresso with just a hint of wd-40 [Music] you

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 2,120,556

Rating: 4.9376855 out of 5

Keywords: espresso pot, metal lathe, thread cutting, rotary table, aluminum welding, making espresso, moka, moka pot, metal working project

Id: qMrlyEreba8

Length: 30min 7sec (1807 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Bettercoalsaw]

As a mokka drinker: use steel. The taste is better.

[u/bonyponyride]

This is not an espresso pot, it's a moka pot. Espresso requires many atmospheres of pressure. This pot requires just over one atmosphere of pressure, a coarser grind than espresso, and the perfect timing to make sure the coffee doesn't burn. Flavor wise, moka isn't as strong as espresso. Appearance wise, moka won't have crema since you need high pressure over a short time to extract the carbon dioxide from the coffee powder. It's a decent alternative to espresso if you have a burr grinder and know what you're doing, but it's not espresso.

[u/Tactineck]

Thought it was interesting to see the penetration on the weld for the spout.

Thought his handle could have been nicer, some posts with a hardwood would have gone nicely. Ended up liking the plaquing though. The welds cleaned up better than I thought they would.

Loved when he built out the little center column in the center. This guy's channel is one of my favorites.

[u/YMK1234]

Gotta love his humor.

[u/stanleyrubicks]

First time seeing a Tony project - very enjoyable. Nice result too.

[u/Buzzer90]

Really enjoyed this. Great music too.

[u/RegencyAndCo]

FUCK YES a new Old Tony video. Love that guy.

[u/Skomarz]

This guy is the 'Ray Romano' of machining..

[u/ultrafud]

What movie is that song from that he keeps playing?