Beogram 4002 Type 5513: Start of a Vintage Beogram Project

This past week I received a beautiful Beogram 4002 Type 5513 (USA model) turntable to examine and determine restoration tasks. It came from the original owner who bought the Beogram new around 1976. Even though the journey for the shipment was not too far it was double boxed as it should be and inside the outer box was the original box. That is always so cool to see that.  The original box has special packing material that secures the turntable chassis, platter, tonearm and dustcover so everything is tight and cannot move. These next sequence of pictures show the unpacking from the Beogram box.

Normally the dust cover would be mounted around this section of the styro-foam mold (fitting on top of the platter). However, in this case the original dust cover is in great shape and doesn't require any work done on it....So we decided, why risk shipping it as it isn't required for any of the other restoration tasks.

The inner styro-foam is removed and here is the Beogram chassis.

Now it is time to look over the turntable and see what kind of wear and tear there is. Overall this is a wonderful example of the 4002. The wood is beautiful and I can't see any sign of fading. No need for any wood work type restoration on this one.

The control panel does show the usual wear from human oil. Our fingers leave permanent wear marks over time. Beolover offers a restoration of the control panel so we will see if that is something the owner will want to do here.

The two removable, aluminum deck plates reveal a bunch of deteriorated plastic pieces inside. No surprise and no concern about that. Those are the old transport lock bushings. The yellowish ones like this unit had are always broken into small pieces by now. All it means is a cleanup task and new bushings will be installed. The original guide washers for the cabinet's wood trim are also gone and replaced by regular metal washers. It would be a good idea to install the replacement guides that are eccentric shaped like the originals were.

Except for the deteriorated bushing pieces the interior is pretty clean. There is a little excess oil on some of the parts but that is easy to clean off.

The tangential arm drive pulley is crack free and appears to be in good shape. We still might replace it with one of Nick's aluminum pulleys.

Mechanically I don't see anything out of whack. The arms are decently aligned and I will go through all of the service manual adjustment checks later once the restoration tasks have been decided.

The arm lowering lever operates really smooth. None of the common stiffness to the movement there.

The DC platter motor is always a question. This one operates extremely quiet so that is a good sign.

So it is time to put on the top platter and bring out the Beolover RPM measurement tool.  Both the 33 1/3 RPM and 45 RPM speeds were off a bit.

I adjusted the speeds with the main board trimmers.

...and was able to bring both speeds into respectable range.

To really know how well the platter motor is doing I will have to let the measurement tool run for several hours (and the platter turning) as a computer records the speed. The results will get plotted and tell us how stable this analog system is.

Here is the speed test start.

While that runs I can write this blog post about the project :)

Another item that may be on the restoration task is the Beogram phono cable. This Type 5513 came with a five pin DIN plug so an adapter is necessary when using the turntable with a non-B&O preamplifier. The original DIN plug looks okay.  We often install a new one so that is an option here. Some people will never be using their Beogram with an amplifier that supports the DIN plug so another option is to install a new phono cable that has RCA jacks.

On this particular Beogram the correct adapter for the DIN plug to RCA plugs must have been lost. This picture shows it being used with the DIN 5 to tape deck RCA plug adapter.

Tomorrow sometime will have the results of the platter motor test and we will go from there.