Ill try not to ramble too much here and keep the point simple.
I have a faberware pot that I modded and it gets the temp easily.
See the thing is, all the pots work the same way, they boil the water and use the steam pressure if you want to call it that, to gurgle the hot water up the tube and out the spout and into the grounds basket. Now for most of these pots, the hose that carries that near boiling water, passes right through the water reservoir. This cools it down significantly, sometimes as much as down to around 150F.
If one can insulate this hose a bit, it will keep the heat much hotter through its trip to the grounds. The thing is to keep the water in the reservoir from leeching the heat out of the tube. An air blanket is one of the easier ways to do this. What I did with my pot is, I took the spout off, and pulled the siphon tube out of the resivoir from where it stuck into the bottom of the pot where the water boiled at. Some pots it's easy to do, mine it pretty much pushed right in and out. Other pots it might not work this easy with the tube and you may have to play a bit. I went to the hardware store... lowes / home depot. any of them will have it as well. I got a piece of that clear vinyl tubing they have that was a bit bigger in diameter than the water tube and I pushed it over the water tube. Now you have water tube / bit of an air pocket / outer vinyl tubing / water reservoir. I cut the end flush of the vinyl tubing about 1/4 inch up from the inner stick in the bottom of the pot tube and goobered it up really well with silicone sealant, even let it go about half an inch up the OUTER tube, to seal it off. Careful you don't get it into the inner tube, thats where your water has to flow. Originally I wanted to just use the silicone to just seal the tube to the bottom of the pot, but that proved a bit difficult with some pots, so opted for sealing the bottom half inch or so of the outer tube instead. If you can seal it to the bottom of the pot, even better but at this point it is not needed that much anymore.
Reassemble the inner tube into the hole you pulled it out of. Put the spout back on and you are good to go after it has dried. If you got one of those pots where you can't pull the lift tube out of the bottom then just take the spout off and snake the vinyl tubing down over it until it hits the bottom of the pot. You'll have to get some goop down there to seal it. Or you can seal about an inch of the top side and since the air can't escape, in theory the water won't be let in as you fill the reservoir and the air pocket is still there. This still lets the water come in contact with the inner tube a bit and some heat transfer will occur but a lot less than the entire tube being able to radiate the heat.
Now the water is heated to pretty much boiling and ran up the tube, the air surrounding it will get warm, eventually hot, but will act as insulation, along with the vinyl tubing, and retain most the heat the water had, and it should hit your spout at 195 or so.
Not exactly in line with this topic, but I thought it might help out.
Aaron
