Beogram 4004 Type 5526: Cleaning and Polishing the Dust Cover

The Beogram 4004 turntable has been test playing in my office listening room for a couple of weeks now. All that is remaining on this project are a couple of cosmetic issues. One is polishing out some minor scratches on the dust cover.

The procedure for this is time consuming because it takes a number of wet sanding steps using finer grit sanding material on each step. After each sanding step I rinse off the excess sanding residue and dry off the dust cover for inspection. Then I rotate the dust cover ninety degrees for the next step so each step is perpendicular to the previous step.

Here is a picture of the Beogram 4004 dust cover prior to beginning the work. It is hard to capture the true severity of the scratches in a photo but you can see there are scratches on the dust cover. I have seen much worse but these are still worth polishing out.

Here is the dust cover and all of the polishing tools laid out on my fabrication table.

This picture shows what to expect after the first wet sanding step. In this case I started out with 600 grit wet sandpaper because there are not any real deep scratches on the dust cover.

After going through 600 grit to 2500 grit sanding steps I reached the 3000 grit sanding step. That is the halfway point in my progression.

Here is the dust cover after the final sanding step of a 12000 grit Micro-Mesh pad.

It is starting to look good again but you can see it is a little hazy by looking at the sanding tool packaging text under the dust cover.

After a buffing polishing step using an eccentric orbiting pad on my power drill the dust cover clarity really comes back.

Here are two pictures of the polished dust cover similar to the two I posted of the dust cover before starting the work. The scratches seen earlier are gone.

This dust cover looks like it is ready to be re-installed on the Beogram.