Again, I’m dumping this on the internet to save some future person some time and effort, maybe keep something useful out of the dumpster. For the sake of hoping something ends up being what Google was once: here you are, future person. If you do not have an Aarke Carbonator Pro problem, he repeated again in the naive hope that web discoverability will someday work right again for someone, you can skip this.
I’m old enough to remember when “my eyes, the goggles do nothing” was a joke, but “my AIs, the googles do nothing” is where we are now.
Anyway: I have an Aarke Carbonator Pro. It’s a fancy Sodastream-like thing that uses nice heavy glass bottles. They seem to have discontinued it, which is unfortunate; it’s very nice.
Symptoms of this particular failure are that when you release the pressure on the bottle, water sprays basically everywhere inside the container and the carbonation is lost. We’ve had ours for about two years before this problem started, using it regularly; fortunately the repair is straightforward.
You need:
– A T10 Torx screwdriver.
– A pair of pliers, any kind.
– A pair of good tin snips and a small piece of light-gauge scrap sheet metal. Just about anything will do, provided you can cut a strip about 3mm – 1/8″ – wide and 10-12mm – 1/2″ long. Cut that part out before we get started.
I’m going to refer to the part you push down to cover the bottles before you carbonate the water in them as the “protective barrel” of the device.
Start by removing the CO2 canister and unscrewing the unlock lever on the right side of the protective barrel of the device. Next, remove the metal logo on the front of the protective barrel – those torx screws are attached to the internal frame too – and the four torx screws around the base. You’ll notice another torx screw on the bottom of the little flange connecting the protective barrel to the rest of the apparatus, but you can ignore that.
Now: screw the unlock lever back in to the exposed barrel. You’ll need it in a minute.
You’ll see that at the top of the exposed innards of the protective barrel, there’s a piece that hinges on two small pins. If you push down the unlock lever, you’ll see that a thin brass piston lifts up the rear of this mechanism, which pushes down the plungers on two valves on the front of the machine. If that lever has a few millimeters of play in it, this is likely to be your problem.
In general when something that’s supposed to be mechanical and not have a lot of moving parts starts to fail for no visible reason, my opening move is always “take it apart slowly and think carefully about how it works, paying close attention to places where a piece of metal is rubbing on a piece of plastic because it’s basically always that.”
If you look at the exposed mechanism of this thing, you can see how the unlocking lever rotates part of the mechanism to activate those valves.
From that, we can infer that this works by releasing the pressurized gas from inside the mechanism before unsealing the bottle, so that gas doesn’t vent out through the water in the bottle, spraying everywhere. What’s failing, then, is that pushing down the release, which pushes up the rod, isn’t pushing it far enough activate those plungers and vent the pressurized gas.
With that in mind, a solution is clear. We can remove that lever part carefully by pulling two pins holding it in place out, sideways, with the pliers. They should come out with very little effort. Then, at the rear of the lever, wrap the metal shim we made around the place the brass piston makes contact, using the divots in the lever to anchor it. On mine, the result looks like this:
Now, when you re-seat it – putting the hinge pins back in place, which should again take only thumb pressure, don’t force it – there should be very little play, if any, in the mechanism.
You can test this by putting the CO2 cylinder back in without replacing the metal shroud. Pushing down the unlock lever should now immediately operate the pressure-release valves, and the machine is back to normal. For me it worked on the first try. Put the cover back on and screw it all back together, taking care not to overtighten anything.
I hope that helps.