After trolling the waters and being jealous of my brother's single group commercial La Pavoni, I decided that I wanted a small machine for home. I spend lots of time making food from scratch (ie. curing my own salamis) and restoring old items (30's optometrist's chair) and, therefore, am very aware of how things work and how they are made. After browsing around the web and visiting restaurant equipment places, I realize that if I get a semi-automatic machine it has to be commercial because the home use ones are twinkies. But I then discovered the lever machines and fell in love as they satisfied my interest in being part of the process. I considered the La Pavoni professional, but decided that while it was nicely built, it just was not a substantial enough machine and that it didn't really compare to the kind of pulls that you can get in a cafe on a lever machine.
Then I discovered the olympia machines which seem to be as close as one can get to having a monster without taking over the house with a three lever, three-hundred pound beast. While they only still make the Cremina 2002, I am more than willing to restore an old machine. Was the Club version really any different? Or did it simply have an extra wand that could dispense hot water instead of steam? Should I assume that the technical and mechanical finesse of these machines was locked in long ago and that they are all awesome? (for example, I know that it has only been in the last two years that pavoni finally dealt with the problem of overheating on the grouphead of their levermachines by adding a heat-dispersion sleeve). I am almost willing to buy a new one, but should I assume that they are still as well made?
Does anyone know where I can find one?