Get acquainted with abrasives and smooth out the lines on that thing.
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Nice. A dried squash stem might work well too.
What, seriously? I must have missed it. Whadidhedo? (More specifically than official ban reason.)
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Iām going to guess he forgot to shrug off people who like to push his buttons, but that the offending posts have been removed since? Dunno. I hope he comes back, I like him.
Nutshells are typically the most heat and flame resistant parts of trees. I knew I guy who had a tobacco pipe made out of a piece of metal tubing inserted into a nutshell, and it worked for years. until he got tired of it. It never did actually wear out.
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Iām not sure about the other thread, but I believed he also got flagged on the mammogram thread from roughly a month/month and a half ago. Iām a passenger in a car right now and Iām not feeling the urge to hunt down specifics (woozy). Maybe someone could help out?
and @TobinL - what about a sphere that is cut in half - the seam parallel to the camera?
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IIRC the aluminium is supposed to get a coating of sorts, that makes it inert and protects it from the coffee/water etc. So there is supposed to be a weird coating. I even heard Italians say that you should be wary of washing aluminium moka brewers too carefully, lest you get rid of this coating and cause wear on the brewer. That sounds like superstition to me, tho.
two āiā. I think Iām in love.
the coating is oxidised metal (āaluminium rustā). Al is rather reactive, but the oxid is stable and resistant. so scratching the oxid layer can be a bad thing for the function of a moka brewer
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Well, I go for US spelling and 'nunciation most of the timeā¦ but I just canāt bring myself to call it a-LOO-me-num. Al-you-mini-yum is clearly the way to go.
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Iād worry more about the brass; the tinning is done purely for health reasons to protect you from the copper (in copper pots and ibriks like mine) and lead leaching from brass (much lower risk) in makers like yours. It is traditionally applied by hand-wiping pure molten tin onto the surface, so the tin itself should be completely safe. There are several places around that will retin copper pots (search on āretinningā), but ibriks are so cheap that it is probably more cost-effective to relegate the old ones to decoration and buy a new one.[quote=āgeneric_name, post:59, topic:77806ā]
Lemme guess-- a Greek, a Turk, and an Armenian.
[/quote]
One was Romanian, actually.
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My parents know my love for Bialetti style coffee makers and found a massive 1 litre model in a random car boot sale in southern France. Unfortunately itās aluminium (soaks up odours and keeps them), and partly due to my mumās attempts to ākeep it freshā itās gone much the same way as yours.
She dropped a teabag into it thinking it would somehow freshen the insides up, but there was a little moisture in there already and the teabag grew mold.
Iāve tried pretty much everything Iāve read on the internet, from salt water to vinegar, lemon juice, and even boiling each of these through the entire thing.
Still makes moldy tasting coffee 
Somehow Iāve resorted to hoping that if I leave it in a cupboard for several years itāll just lose itās dank smell. Wishful thinking I guess.
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Yup. Tried a few rounds of vinegar myself. 
seconded, and I know from disrespectful.
was given enough rope. In short.
Or vice versa. Yeah. Vice versa.
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A few decades back these gigantic moka pots were pretty commonly used for brewing coffee in French institutional settings, like cafeterias.
I donāt think it is the aluminum that is absorbing the odor; most odor molecules are much larger than the tiny pores in the metal. More likely the inside of the brew tube never got thoroughly cleaned, maybe even has some film or gunk in it that is retaining the smell and taste. Have you tried running brushes (like for cleaning lab equipment) up into the tube?
You could also try something like Everpure Scale Kleen and very hot or boiling water, but be careful you donāt dissolve the whole brewer!
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Sorry to hear that.
As interesting as radiation imaging is, I wish heād thought better of entering a mammogram thread!
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I like āhappy accidentsā as much as the next guy, but in this case you might have been better off spending the same time and effort procuring a stainless steel version of your Moka, so as not to continue leaching aluminum into your body with every sip of acidic caffeine slurry.
Sometimes breakage is an opportunity ā¦
My stainless moka pots are hugely inferior to my aluminum ones in operation. Out of curiosity, what problem are you thinking of that are associated with the aluminum?
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Iāve seen big aluminium pressure cookers and restaraunt pots that had craters in the bottom you could stack coins in. People ate all that metal, and the last time I checked* nobody had any idea what eating aluminum contaminated sauce might do to you.
* corrections appreciated!
Those are high-volume situations; the amount of aluminum that leeches out of an aluminum coffee pot in any one serving is negligible, far less than occurs naturally in a cup of tea (Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969796053478), and as you say nobody knows whether there is a health risk of ingesting aluminum in these quantities. Meanwhile, stainless steel is known to leech nickel quantities that are problematic for some people. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1514841)
You can buy moka pots that are aluminum in the base but ceramic in the top; if you are paranoid about imagined health effects then these might be the best bet, as the only time coffee-infused hot water contacts metal is when it is (rapidly) passing through the brew tube.
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