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Jun 12, 2023

Get the Lead Out: The Longstanding Challenge of Lead in Espresso MachinesDaily Coffee News by Roast Magazine

This is a fantastic piece of work!!! I LOVE your in yer face style plainly

This is a fantastic piece of work!!! I LOVE your in yer face style plainly showing how ridiculous government can get. I’ve been in the automotive trade for decades and NOWHERE is this MO anywhere near as insane as with the regs, rules, etc for cars. (by the bye, don't bother with a ’63 MGB, find a ’64 or newer. First year of the venerable Bee carried over the same block as the MGA and Nuffield engines had… a three main crankshaft, not bad for 1275 cc, but too spindly for even 1600, let alone 1800. 1964 onward brought a new block with five main crsnkshaft, FAR stronger).NO ONE is going to fit a length of solid lead pipe to a machine, anyway. Yet ere they are knickers all beknotted (and brains besotted) over a difference of point zero five percent lead in a bit that waighs in at less than fifty grammes, perhaps eight percent of which will come into contact with water.

Why did they not simply place a ceiling on the maximum measured lead content in a finished one ounce shot, (under VERY specific standardised test protocols) and let that suffice? I know why: not enough work to justify the existence of all the government minions milling about specifying this and that part, percentages of lead in pieces , which will necessitate invading every diffeent machine and variation in the marketplace. Talk about "swarms of officers" flooding the countryside….

The standard based on the percentage of lead in the total weight of parts contacting water is ridiculous, too… what if I make a boiler out of brass, .3% lead content, that is one litre working capacity, and the walls are 3 mm thick. It passes….. by the maths being run. Now suppose I find that wall thickness to be unreliable, and switch to a new model boiler the exact same capacity and inside dimensions, but make the walls all 6 MM thick. I have doubled the weight of that component… but not changed the surface area in direct contact with water by one square nanometer. But the doubled weight would potentially disqualify the machine with this part in it.It is also ridiculous to declare I can change this component to a non-complying bit, same function, and after I do that cannot sell the machine Hmmmm.. might i instead GIVE or TRADE it away, to someone who needs such a machine?

One thing I always wonder about then I read of such anal retentive government response to a "problem":J in this instance, is there even ONE documented case where some individual who drinks some outrageous number of espresso shots per day, and has from this one shop on their one machine, actually presented with health issues indicating high lead content in their body.. and having thoroughly followed things out to the nth degree, established a certain link between THAT espresso machine and THIS health issue? I rather thought not……

Thanks for your piece… I had no idea this charade existed. Your "work-arounds" to bolster the odds of surviving the inspections are hilarious. Your fears of occupying the same barrel as someone's boiler being acid dipped are perhaps well grounded.. consider that poor sap who reengineered the fuel metering computer for Volkswagen. At IDLE only, NOx was 0.04 above EPAs stated limit.. AT IDLE. At run in their mode, NOx were signficantly lower as a percentage of exhaust than EPA maximum allowable. Even before one considers that in VW programme mode, the cars returned so much better fuel mileage that their output PER MILE was a small fraction of EPA's stated limits… not to mention that, compared to running in EPA mode all its service life, each car wold burn around 3,000 gallons less diesel than the same car returns running in EPA mode. That engineer is in prison.. for saving fuel, reducing "carbon footprint", designing a cleaner burning engine, fewer pollutants of every sort……. saving money for their customers…