Beocord 5000 (4715/4716): Polishing of Plexiglass Panel

I started working on another Beocord 5000 (4715/4716) restoration. It appears that cassette tapes are making their comeback to catch up with vinyl...;-). What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than with making a mixtape for a loved one! I miss this way of showing affection...these days, all we do is swap Spotify playlists...not much Labor of Love in that! 

In this spirit I started out with polishing the badly scratched panel of a spare Beocord 5000 as a practice run for the better-condition panel that will go with the Beocord once I am done with its internal restoration. I felt I needed a practice run, since I worried about the coating layer that is on the plexiglass panels of these B&O units. It appears they felt that this coating would improve the shininess of the surface, since it appears that it does not change the tint of the panel. After I polished it, the tint appeared very similar despite the missing coating.

Here is a picture of the heavy damage of this panel:

I essentially followed the polishing procedure that I applied to the panels of my Beolab 4500 speakers. See here and here for a detailed description of this process.

The main difference with the Beocord 5000 panel occurred during the first sanding step with 220 grit dry paper to get rid of the heavy scratches. When I started sanding, immediately the coating disintegrated into tiny shreds and I observed this wool-like appearance:

After I worked through this step everything was as usual and I progressed through the ever finer sandpapers of the Micromesh polishing kit. A pretty good workout! After I went through all the sanding steps I followed up with their polishing solution, and then I ended up with a pretty nice result:

There are still a few minor scratches that are visible to detailed scrutiny, but I think this panel would now look very nice in the usual setting in a living room etc...It is very difficult to get them absolutely perfect since the slightest oversight in one of the polishing steps requires to go back to this step and repeat the entire procedure from that point on.