How To Turn A R2k Coffee Machine Into A R20k Masterpiece

Why buy an expensive coffee machine when you can upgrade a much cheaper one into a championship beast?

That’s what we did in our coffee-fuelled (and dependant) household. After watching a video of James Hoffmann, an ex-barista champion turned social media exponent, on the most modified coffee maker craze in the world ever, we had to try it.

Getting started

Essentially, you take a Gaggia Classic machine, strip it apart, and then replace some of the components with other components to digitise the analog.

You add a Gaggiuino controller board and a few other parts like a touchscreen display, a new hardware fuse, temperature and pressure regulator and a boiler relay. But most importantly, it allows you to add an integrated hardware scale, which allows you to measure the weight of an extracted shot to perfection.

The Gaggiuino allows you to do pretty advanced stuff, like pre-infusion and temperature and pressure surfing to simulate stuff like a lever machine. But it starts at R20,000 and seems like a silly expense if you can upcycle a cheaper machine.

We were lucky enough to find a Gaggia Classic on Facebook Marketplace and bought it for R2,000 from a guy down the road from us who was looking to upgrade.

Now, we had to find all the bits and pieces needed to modify the Gaggia Classic into a super Gaggiuino precision coffee extraction machine.

This is the process: you buy a kit from a Hong Kong company called Peak Coffee. The kit contains all the components you need – and there’s a Forum for geeks who want to attempt this mod.

Sounds simple, right?

Until you take the machine apart and you have what looks like a spaghetti junction on your workbench. But by carefully following the instructions and asking any questions you may have on the forum, it all fits back together in the end.

You will need a whole lot of 3D-printed parts. You can buy these bits, but if you have your own 3D printer, that makes it so much easier. We used what we think is one of the best 3D printers in the universe, the Bambu Lab P1S (R19,395), which we bought from BuildVolume in Pretoria.

The components we printed were: a low-profile drip tray (which we further modified with some nice laser-cut and bent stainless steel bits), a water port cover and a screen mount. We downloaded the designs from 3D printing database printables.com, designed by Loogle.

We also downloaded a stainless-steel drip tray grid cover, which we had laser cut and bent by the masters at TFDM laser in Somerset West.

The journey to fantastic coffee

Pulling the first shot was nerve-wracking. However, with a few tweaks to the settings here and there, we turned a humble coffee maker into a coffee connoisseur’s dream.

But remember, you can’t make good coffee without a good grinder. Enter the LX Italia Newton 55 coffee grinder – also modified to perfection with a dosing cup and a single dosing funnel, this time of our own design. Our genius little grinder is from Coffee Machine Warehouse.

Together, our mods of the Gaggia Classic into a Gaggiuino and the adjustments to the grinder have made our coffee experience infinitely better. And much cheaper.