The group is getting a few modifications. The original design comprised two castings: the main body and a short sleeve, that were thermally shrink-fit together and machined after assembly.
We have replaced the second casting with an AISI 316 sleeve that lines the entire bore of the body. As well as being easier to manufacture and thermally indistinguishable from the all-bronze version, the sleeve has benefits for water distribution. First, it is compatible with E61 slip-on shower screens; we now use a 35µm mesh screen which we found gives the best results after considerable testing. Second, a radial channel around the outside of the sleeve distributes incoming brew water and injects it into the brew chamber via 8 ports instead of the single port in the original design.
These two changes improve the symmetry of the water flow into the chamber and result in a reduction in turbulence above the puck. We have also moved away from bronze to stainless for the cam for strength and longevity and to reduce our use of chrome – which we do wherever possible for environmental reasons.
The other changes, with a few exceptions, are incremental improvements that either simplify or improve the stuff under the hood. This is done not just to streamline the manufacturing and assembly process, but to build a more robust machine – in short: the simpler it is, the less there is to go wrong. Changes like this include a redesigned boiler that makes welding (slightly) easier, a new, stiffer, laser-cut 3D jigsaw puzzle frame, a reworked hydraulic system to reduce component count and to make assembly and maintenance easier, some streamlining of the wiring harness and the elimination of a couple of internal plastic parts.
The new 3D jigsaw puzzle frame uprights increase lateral rigidity and locational precision using fewer components. A win, a win and a win.
I mentioned that there were a few exceptions to the incremental-type improvements. The first, which is still in development but will should make it into this edition, is a new interface for the electronics. The interface in the first two editions – a very small screen with three control buttons – was located under the cup warmer to protect it from water. A new (slightly larger) screen and capacitive touch interface are being integrated into the splash-proof main electronics housing under the drip tray.
A new PID algorithm, developed and optimized specifically for the DS by an expert in renewable energy systems with a PhD in electrical engineering, brings an entire order of magnitude improvement in boiler temperature stability. What difference does this make to the expresso? None that I can tell as the thermal stability of the massive bronze group casting smoothed out what little variation there was due to the previous algorithm. But ten times better performance is still ten times better – how can you say no? Oh, and I nearly forgot that we now also have a formed drip tray insert that radically diminishes standing water – no more puddles.
And there are also the coffee tools of course, DS owners get an automatic 15% reduction on all the Lapera tools and we will powder-coat them to match any custom colors.
I once watched a documentary about a group of people who had signed up to walk across a bed of coals. You know, the hot, fiery kind that are left after you set fire to a pile of logs – that are perfect for roasting potatoes in tinfoil or a lamb on a spit, but not at all inviting to walk across. Why they were doing this I forget, but it had to be in California some place. Why California? Well, apart from the fact that there was a fire-walking guru involved and everyone was, as far as I recollect, speaking English, where else could it, realistically, have been? The group (no-doubt) consisted predominantly of marketing assistants, soccer moms and at least one dentist seeking deeper meaning or minimally wishing to up their conversational anecdotal game on an extended weekend in the forested foothills of Sonoma County. I have a hazy memory of the guru himself, who was definitely a white guy and (I would like to think) had shoulder-length hair and wore white robes and leather sandals (but more likely cut-off chinos and less-than-white sneakers) but I do distinctly remember the instructions that he gave to his students in their weekend quest to achieve mind over matter: to “think of walking barefoot through an unmown lawn, heavy and wet with pre-dawn dew”, while reciting a mantra of “cool grass” to themselves as they walked, literally, through fire.
Our courageous narrator-participant is an earnest, middlingly charismatic fellow, typical of such pre-reality tv small-D documentaries, professionally mildly sceptical (for dramatic purposes) and possibly somewhat personally concerned (as the barer of the actual feet that would be put in an actual fire at the behest of his producer for our viewing pleasure). We cut from him receiving instruction in-group from the guru to a first-person direct-to-the-camera soliloquy where he voices his doubts about the efficacy of the methodology and wisdom of his career choice. Then, inevitably, we are introduced to the anti-guru: the expert from a renown (but conveniently located) center of higher learning – urban, knowledgeable, dispassionate and, above all else, rational. The scientist brandishes and demonstrates the tools of quantification: temperature probes, human flesh analogs and anatomical foot simulators and rumbles ominously about time-temperature-transformation charts, delta-tees and third degree burns.
The final afternoon of the weekend is taken up with building a twenty-foot long stack of crisply split hardwood logs and in a last meal (or was it a supper?) at a long table facing what is now a large and extremely intense and intimidating fire. It is hot. As the flames die down and the sun begins to set, the group sits in a circle around the guru while they remove their shoes and roll up their pant legs. The fire pit is still radiating a considerable heat – the air shimmers above it and the orange glow it throws off lights the group of rather nervous faces as the final moment draws near. If you have walked bare foot on the beach on a hot, sunny day, you have an idea of what is in store for these would-be firewalkers. Indeed, at this point, faced with the prospect of voluntarily walking into a real fire, a large proportion of the participants get, as it were, cold feet and chicken out. A few brave souls remain, among whom, of course, is our narrator, who is being paid to do this and consequently has no choice. First it is the turn of guru. He walks up to the start of the pit, pauses, presumably in meditation, before walking serenely across the entire length of the fire and stands, seemingly unscathed, at the far end. Then, one by one they line up, and with loud and frequent shouts of “cool grass”, walk extremely briskly or run – like a cat on a hot tin roof – some of the way across the coals before jumping off and plunging their feet into a bucket of cold water. Does our hero make it all the way across? Possibly, I forget. But I do seem to remember the look on his face – triumph mixed with chagrin? – as he, sitting in a lawn chair, and now understandably less interested in narrating for the camera, examines the burns on the soles of his feet.
Why am I telling you this? Well, apart from the fact that the dentist was right: it is a good story, it is, depending on your point of view, a story as much about mind over matter as it is science1. I am certain, from a scientific point of view, that the guru’s feet were just as burnt as our narrator’s and that later, after everyone has gone home, he will be applying the burn cream to his soles, but I am equally certain that at that moment he chose and was able not to feel it.
And with that we segue, completely seamlessly, into the actual subject of this post, which is the new steam wand. I could go into the details of what is new, and talk about the “kit” that it replaces that was sold by the (Italian) manufacturer that, for the life of me, I cannot assemble in any way that does not result in hot water and steam escaping energetically from every place it isn’t supposed to, or the quality or rather lack thereof, of the chrome finish which resulted in a least a third failing inspection. Suffice it to say that, with the exception of the wand itself and the two-hole tip, which come from two different manufacturers, everything other than the seals and the spring is made by us. But rather than talk about what is new I would prefer to discuss what is not. Some people have asked why we don’t have one of those silicone or plastic handle thingies on the steam wand so you don’t burn yourself. And my answer is that they are aesthetically displeasing and that I have used machines without them for decades without ever burning myself (badly). Yes, the metal wand gets really hot when you run steam through it. Yes, it will burn your fingers if you hold on to it. So just don’t do that – give it a quick nudge back into place once your done with it and you’ll be fine. I’m with the guru on this one: mind over matter.
1 – and cultural appropriation of (the trappings of) eastern spiritualism by privileged westerners for often philosophically dubious reasons and/or, as in this case, personal gain.
The 2nd edition Lapera DS hydraulics look, at first glance, a lot like the first edition. BUT they are not!
Here is what’s new in the redesigned boiler and hydraulic system:
All boiler components are 316L stainless steel and are welded by The sTIG®
Double-flanged boiler opens at both ends for cleaning
Engineered o-ring gland seals on the main boiler openings and the group (which seal to higher pressure at significantly lowers levels of torque) – trust me they are just better
New layout of upper and lower pipe runs for ease of installation and service
New slimmer over-pressure safety valve
New (La Marzocco) anti-vacuum/burp valve and silicon tubing (with an heat-shedding extension to prolong the life of the otherwise slightly fickle o-ring in LM’s design) – no more steam and condensation in the boiler compartment during warm up
Redesigned end flange incorporates a dedicated rigid connection for the safety pressurestat
Redesigned breakout circuit board with upgraded connectors to facilitate assembly and maintenance (this has nothing whatsoever to do with the hydraulics, but it is new and in this photo… so)
A quick word on the pressurestat, which I perhaps haven’t discussed elsewhere:
The p-stat is primarily a safety feature as the machine is electronically piloted by the Lapera controller using PID. In its current configuration, it serves to cut electricity to the entire system in the (unlikely) event of runaway heating and overpressure (in which case it will also deploy oxygen masks to all passengers). Under normal circumstances it will never operate. However, electronics are inherently more complicated than everything else here and are therefore, by definition, orders of magnitude more prone to failure. To address this issue, we have taken a “black-box” approach to the control and interface design of the Lapera DS: the control electronics are all gathered together in a single, literal black box and the user interface itself is unobtrusively tucked away out of sight inside the bodywork. In thirty years when, say, a power supply capacitor reaches the end of its life, what will happen? In most machines made today, finding spare parts to replace the electronics that are likely integrated into the user-facing interface of the machine three decades from now will be challenging, if not completely impossible. With the DS, simply by changing two wires inside the machine to put the p-stat in line with the heating element you can have a fully-functional machine again while you wait for your ten-year-old to build you a replacement for the black box control electronics.
Please note however, that while batteries are included with the DS, ten-year-olds are not – that part is on you.
Some say that he spends three hours a day staring directly into the sun and that his visor is actually entirely opaque. All we know is that he is called the sTIG.
This series of posts is about invisible updates to a largely invisible part of the machine: the boiler. This particular upgrade however, is both the invisibilest and the most important: the person doing the welding. I’ve said elsewhere that welding is both a skill and an art. Like very few other industrial activities, welding, especially TIG welding, is a manual skill akin to playing an instrument that requires both talent and vast amounts of practice. There are good welders and bad welders and the latter vastly outnumber the former.
I am a passable welder. I, at least, know what is supposed to happen, what is not supposed to happen and how, in theory, to achieve / avoid both. The execution, on the other hand, is a different story. Malcolm Gladwell1introduced the idea of the 10,000 rule hour in his hugely popular (in both senses of the word) 2008 book Outliers. The precis: the greatest are great at what they do because of talent, opportunity but mostly because they spent at least ten thousand hours mastering their craft2.
In welding, the 10,000 hour rule applies. I break out the welding equipment perhaps once a month for small jobs and a once or twice a year for more extended sessions. I took one welding course once upon a time over a summer while I was at university. I didn’t spend years learning the craft as an apprentice to a master welder and I haven’t spent the three hours a day for ten years practicing to develop and maintain the skills required for TIG welding. This occasional use makes me an amateur as opposed to a professional, a Sunday painter as opposed to a Jackson Pollock and a Sunday driver next to the sTIG.
The Lapera workplace, while sometimes intense, tends not to be over-populated with people who punch other people when they don’t get a hot dinner. We will also depart slightly from British Motoring Television tradition by naming the man behind the helmet: Martin Berthelot is a professional welder. And rather a good one. In fact, an insanely good one. And it is he, as opposed to me who will be welding the Lapera boilers.
First things first: the bolt rings that hold the end plates and seals in place – important, you know, for keeping the water in the boiler. For this, of course, we built a jig. And a very fancy one at that. The shoulders of the bolt studs need to be held up against against the ring from the underside – so the pockets that they sit in are spring-loaded.
And then the best bit: the fingers that hold the ring down extend and retract to allow the ring to be installed and removed after welding.
Finally, the screw is tightened with the giant handle (with a thrust bearing to manage the considerable load) and forces everything down onto the aluminum heatsink in order to draw away the distortion-inducing heat as quickly as possible after the completion of the weld.
And look at that: loads of wheelspin off the line (and barely any HAZ (Heat Affected Zone)) as the sTIG powers down the straight towards the first corner.
Perfect overlapping fish scales with almost no coloration of the weld bead. Mindboggling control.
The next step is to complete another sub-assembly – or sub-weldment: the heat exchanger (HX). The HX is comprised of a 316L stainless casting and a capped 316L tube. The casting replaces a far more complicated weldment which was a composite of five separate parts. Simpler is (almost) always better.
The sTIG handles the oversteer going into the first corner with aplomb delivering an impeccable “full-penetration” weld, so-called because the material of the parts is melted all of the way from the outside to the inside and is mixed with “fresh” filler rod material to create a perfect corrosion-resistant weld.
Now we move onto another jig, affectionately known, for reasons that will no doubt be apparent to the knowledgeable readers of this humble blog, as “The Slayer“.
This jig does double duty for the fairly complex task of alignment and clamping for positioning the bolt rings at both ends of the main boiler tube.
And down into Hammerhead, the trickiest corner on the track, with the argon gas purge lines in place the sTIG is feathering the throttle to achieve the delicate balance between weld penetration and heat input.
Heading into Gambon then, the sTIG is making it look easy. In fact, this one, the interior junction of the HX and main boiler tubes, is really off-the-charts crazy. This weld is performed inside the boiler tube. I don’t know, I can barely get my hand inside, let alone weld in this space and the sTIG is not a small man (but he does have small children. Hmmmm.) Not only that, but some parts of the weld are not visible while you are welding, even if you use a mirror (in which case you have to weld upside-down and backwards – ever tried cutting your own hair in the mirror?). Judging only from the intensity of the light given off by the weld arc hidden around the corner, the sTIG can actually weld blind.
And he’s across the line. Here is the grand tour of the main boiler, welded entirely from the inside to minimize corrosion.
At the risk of overextending my professional racing driver metaphor, every corner on a race track is distinct and is more or less difficult, requiring a particular approach speed, breaking point, line through it etc. It is the sum of the driver’s successes (and failures) in the individual corners that make up the overall time for the lap. A mistake on any one of the corners results in either a bad time or going off the track. The welding here is also a sequential process. The individual welds, none of which can be regarded as particularly easy, are performed one after another. A mistake on any one of them will ruin the part. High stakes indeed. Fortunately for us, the sTIG is a consummate professional.
1 – Not quite an apologist for laisse-faire industrial capitalism, but almost?
2 – Others have since argued, compellingly in my opinion, that the fourth ingredient is the quality of instruction. What and how you practice during those 10,000 hours turns out to be, unsurprisingly, important.
One of the major advantages of the diagonal heat exchanger boiler in the Lapera is that there is a separate water path to the group. This means that the water from the boiler is not used to actually make coffee. If you have ever seen the inside of a well-used boiler, you will know why this is a good thing. The major disadvantage of the diagonal heat exchanger boiler from a fabrication point of view is there is a separate water path to the group. The separate path requires a second chamber that passes through the boiler – a volume that pierces another volume. This means, topologically speaking, that instead of there being just an inside and an outside, there are two insides and one outside – three surfaces that have to be protected simultaneously during welding where they intersect. When welding from the outside things are fairly easy: cover all the holes, fill all the interiors with purge gas and the gas from the torch itself protects the exterior surface. But what if you want weld from the inside (which we do, because it’s waaay better, trust me on this)? One of the solutions is removing all of the oxygen from the room in which the welding is taking place. But this, oddly enough, is not very popular with the people doing the welding. Other solutions require some kind of localized, gas-filled shroud that covers the exterior of the parts being welded. This can be more or less complicated depending on the shape of the parts that are being assembled. The boiler is a bit on the complicated side of the shape scale, so the shrouds, which also have to fit in/around the jig that holds the parts, are a bit, well, tricky.
Cutaway of the boiler – one volume piercing another creating a separate path for fresh water to reach the group. (The casting is (unfortunately) not pink in real life. Were that it were.)
Shrouds in place to protect the outside of the inside of the inside.
The shroud for the lower end of the heat exchanger (HX) is straightforward-ish. The only minor complication is that the HX tube does not pass exactly through the central axis of the main boiler tube, so the radius cut through the shroud is not quite symmetrical. After welding an end cap onto a small section of square aluminum tubing, the radius cut is easy enough if you have a CNC mill. Which, lucky children that we are, we do.
Quite a few bits of turned and threaded lumps of brass and various adaptors later and, good-enough-for-not-very-close-friends-and-family-whose-company-you-don’t-particularly-enjoy-but-keep-asking-you-to-weld-this-piece-of-their-neighnour’s-friend’s-dishwasher notwithstanding, one lower end purge shroud.
Where things get a little more challenging is at the top end of the HX with the new boiler casting. Both of these purging shrouds, it has to be said, were a bit of an afterthought in that they were thought about after the alignment jig was built. Both of the shrouds could have (and should have) been integrated directly into the jigs themselves. Last time I had my eyes tested, I was shocked to fined out that I don’t have 20-20 foresight.
Not having the right size of tubing on hand, I thought it would be quick to weld a few scraps of angle together.
Yeah, well, not so much. I had forgotten just how hard it is to weld aluminum. It took an entire morning of failing to weld with much swearing, vaporizing of electrodes and grinding out of contaminated welds before I remembered that welding aluminum is like going to McDonalds: I go to McDonalds about once every four years in order to remind myself why I don’t go to McDonalds more often. Also akin to a trip to the Scottish restaurant, once it is in the past (and you machine away most of the mess you make) it is just a bad memory.
A perfect 60 degree angled cut through the not exactly perfect DIY square tubing.
Looks like something. Don’t know what yet. But it definitely needs a cap. Yup.
Now we just need a knife.
Sorry… …This Old Tony.
And a couple of flanges (close your eyes if you don’t want to be exposed to the welds – but cut me some slack, it is just a jig for Pete’s sake).
As promised, this week’s post is all about jigs (not about jig-jig, despite the title). Well, jigs and purging. When all the parts are finally made, checked, polished, rechecked and sterilized in the autoclave ready for surgery (only mild hyperbole), two more things have to happen before the magic moment when the arc strikes and two pieces of stainless steel become one: they have to held together in the correct alignment and all of the oxygen in the air surrounding the weld location has to displaced or purged – usually with another, inert, gas. This is where jigs and purging come in.
But before we get to the the fancy bits, first some ground-work.
Cutting the stainless tubing to rough length on Soco Xiānshēng. The 3-phase Soco gearhead cold saw, by far the highest quality tool in the building, used to be known as Soco-San but, it turns out, is actually Taiwanese, so this may have been cultural appropriation, inappropriate and/or just wrong. So even though Soco-San sounds better, Soco Xiānshēng it is.
The before: replete with sharp hairy edges, nasty burrs, greasy mill finish, dents and scratches.
The after: squared and chamfered on the lathe, polished and de-greased to within a nanometer of clean-room cleanliness.
Heat exchanger tubes and flange castings ready on deck.
The first alignment jig ensures that the side-to-side and axial orientation of the tube is correct with respect to the flange casting. Kissing cousins?
Now things start to get a little more elaborate: a dry run with test parts of the heat exchanger (HX) and main boiler tube alignment jig. This setup fixes the depth of the HX through the main boiler tube and ensures that the boiler tube is level and aligned with the bolt pattern on the group flange. Ever-ting gonna be nice’an straight.
So I promised purging as well, but I only got as far as jigs and I am already a day late on my deadline. I’m afraid you’ll just have to come back for more.
The Titanic, according to my admittedly mildly-unprofessional research, had 24 of these gargantuan boilers, made by Harland & Wolff Shipyard in Belfast (I doff my hat to you and struggle to maintain control of my lower mandible), that collectively consumed 600 tons of coal a day (shoveled by 200 workers!) in order to maintain the ship at cruising speed. 600 tons. I’m gonna say that again: 600 tons. 15 Jumbo Jets. A day. Mind boggling. So to describe the Lapera boiler upgrade as Titanic is a bit of stretch. OTOH, the Titanic’s boilers were only in service for 4 days and 3 hours (if you include the brief period post-iceberg) so we are already well ahead in that regard.
So why a blog post about this? Well, the boiler has undergone a major design revision for the second edition and, as it is by far the most complicated part of the machine and is completely unseen hidden away inside, it deserves a little more narrative-intensive attention and continuity than the Gram can provide. This will require backing up a little so if you have been following the stream there will be a little repetition to allow the narration to catch up with the intervening flow of time (time only going the one way and all that (another corollary of that pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics)).
The biggest and invisibilest upgrade to the boiler is the change from 304 stainless to 316. 316 is generally and significantly superior to 304 in terms of corrosion resistance mostly because it contains a much higher proportion of nickel. The high nickel content makes it quite a bit more expensive than its baby brother. Which may, or may not, be a factor explaining its non-universality in coffee machine boilers. No judgements here. Just saying.
So on to some of the bits and pieces, of which there are a quite a few, that make up the beating heart of the Lapera machine. First up: the main boiler tubes. Cutting these tubes, or rather finding someone to cut them without screwing them up, has been, until recently, the second-greatest problem / source of irritation since the start of this project in 2016; second only in hassle-quotient to the foundry work. Here they are, cut on an completely over-kill bus-sized lathe this time around because I cannot, to save my life, find anyone with a laser tube cutter who will do this correctly. Done also, despite the 500% increase in the price of nickel in March and subsequent collapse/suspension of the London Metals Exchange where all the world’s nickel is traded. (The causes and ramifications of this is a fascinating story btw. At least to me.)
Close-up of the engraved logo. These are a whole other source of complexity as the final appearance of engraving is very dependent on maintaining a consistent depth of cut -which is extremely difficult to do on a solid that deviates at all from its Platonic ideal. This was trivial when the tubes were laser-cut. Don’t get me started.
Next but not least are the threaded inserts that are welded into each opening in the boiler wall to provide ports for all the comings and goings of two flavors of water phases. This package contains an infinite number of said inserts, which is surprising because it (ie. the package) fits comfortably on the table.
They seem to fit ;) Who knew?
Ok, now that we are more or less caught up. Here is something new (and quite exciting if you are into that kind of thing) to end today’s post: a cast 316 stainless group flange. This casting replaces the original flange that was a built up from individual pieces of sheet metal, all of had to be cut, machined and then welded together. The neck angle is also integrated into the casting which promotes precision of the boiler weldment by a considerable degree. Oh boy, this is soooo much simpler and simpler is soooo much better.
A little QC and a few corrective measures on the all-important flange faces.
The next post will be about jigs and purging I think.
“And I can recall our caravel: a little wicker beetle shell with four fine masts and lateen sails, its bearings on Cair Paravel.” 2
The Gist.
We make things, unlikely things, in small quantities, mostly by hand, and in a place where it is expensive to do this. The second edition Lapera DS is available now for pre-sale and the price is $12k Canadian. This is a lot by any measure, but not, we feel, and if you understand the process, by any means excessive.
The Longer Version.
I grew up in England in a place where they used to build working sailing ships. It was on the estuary of a minor river and the boats were smallish, made of wood, and slightly dogged. The pubs had nautical names and low tide revealed a collection of rubber boots claimed from the unwise and unwary by the estuary mud. There was a rose-covered bower at the bottom of our garden made from an old rowing dinghy, its stern buried in the ground, and a mysterious sail loft, far larger than the surrounding houses, towered over the garden wall. All that was left of the industry along the waterfront was a collection of empty sheds, crumbling quays, collapsing slipways and a strong air of pathos – now of course all erased by rather unimaginative imitation Victorian housing estates, definitely colder, if not also sadder than what was there before. As with many other places in the West, industry, not to be confused with industriousness, has moved on: where I come from they don’t make much of anything anymore.
I like boats. You may have noticed. There are similar distinctions to be made in boat building as there are in the making of coffee machines. There is a world of difference between “a silent, sweet sailboat slipping through the cool water”3 and a hole in the water lined with wood. Unlike espresso machines (no matter how you feel about your morning coffee), boats have that edge of life-and-death about them: if the water is cold, if it is deep, and most especially if it is angry, you very much want to be in a tight ship and not a wood-lined hole. Both coffee machines and sailboats are outdated technology: one is essentially a steam engine and the other has, well, sails. Coffee machines however, unlike sailboats (beautiful and graceful as they may be), retain a deep relevance to contemporary society: rather more people drink coffee at work than sail to get there. Ultimately, both sailboats and coffee machines are cultural as well as technical objects, inextricably tied to their time and place and to the people who make and use them. How something is made, how deeply its maker understands it and how closely that person is connected to the people who will ultimately use it, are, in my view at least, important. Put simply, culture is difficult, if not impossible, to outsource.
The city of Montreal dates back to the French colonial fur trade and has always been heavily enmeshed in the textile industry. My first three studio spaces in Montreal were in former textile and fur lofts in the old part of the city. The building in Montreal’s Mile End, where Laperas are made, was a leather goods factory (which had been variously and previously: a car wash, a body and transmission shop, a gas station and a stable). Historically, Mile End served as a gateway to successive waves of European immigration. After the second world war, the textile industry grew rapidly until it drew a nearly twenty-thousand strong labour force from the mostly European diasporas (Jews, Greeks, Portuguese, Italians) of the immediate surrounding populations. As with many other kinds of manufacturing, low overseas labour costs coupled with dirt-cheap containerized shipping led at first to the slow decline and then the rapid collapse of the local needlework trade. The loss of tens of thousands of jobs almost overnight had a huge impact on the people who worked there, and left a ghost town of empty factories. Into that vacuum rushed the artists, tech startups and other post-industrial actors in search of cheap space. Now the main industry in the area (other than flat whites) is video games; as about as post-industrial as it gets. The vast flow of European immigrants has left its mark on the neighborhood in the form of churches and synagogues, bakeries and delis, the world’s best bagels (sorry New York, you’re just wrong) and, of course, proper coffee.
Da capo al fine is an Italian term (all the good ones are) in music, meaning “repeat from the beginning” (literally “from the head to the end”), or, as Humphrey Bogart actually didn’t say in Casablanca: “Play it again, Sam.” So, after a few months spent sweeping under the tables, sharpening the chisels and polishing the chandeliers, it is time to take it from the top. We have come full circle and are laying the keels of the second edition Lapera DS: twelve serial numbers from 0010 to 0021. Based on the experience gained during the production of the first edition and the feedback from the Founders’ Circle owners, this edition will have quite a few tweaks to improve, refine and better what can be improved, refined and bettered. So we’re playing it again, Sam, only a little bit better. The price, from beam to beam and stem to stern, is $12k Canadian. A lot, I know, but they don’t build ’em like this anymore. The edition should ship, if all goes well, in the first part of 2022.
For aforementioned unscientific and capricious reasons, the majority of this edition is already spoken for. There are still a few machines in search of a good home however, so please get in touch if you would like one.
Thomas
(1) Howard Chapelle, 10 ft Rowing and Sailing Dinghy (2) Joanna Newsom, Bridges and Balloons (3) Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
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tsm on The New New: “The price is 9717.17USD The down-payment is 40% of that which is 3886.87” May 27, 16:38
Matthew Bachofen on The New New: “I’m confused how 40% of $3800 is $9717? I think maybe there’s a typographical error.” May 27, 03:55
tsm on The New New: “Hi Michael, the 3rd edition is already in production.” Jan 12, 16:54
Michael Kraft on The New New: “Please tell me a date when the 3rd generation will be built. Thanks Michael” Jan 12, 11:01
Philipp Jäger on Some-say: “thanks a lot!” Oct 11, 19:06
