Beogram 4002 (5523): Polishing of the In- and Outside of the Hood

After installing the Beolover 4002 Commander MkII remote control and the internal RIAA pre-amplifier board into the Beogram 4002 (5523), the final step was to polish the hood. As usual this hood had the typical scratches on the outside. Unfortunately, and unusually, this one also had a big scratch on the inside:

The inside is much harder to polish since one hits the corners with the polishing block, and it is impossible to polish all the way into corners and to the side panels. Fortunately, the scratch was a bit away from the edges and so I was able to work on it. The key to polishing an inside scratch is to enlarge the polishing area with each step to ensure that the scratches introduced by a polishing step are erased in the next at the fringes of the polished area. This shows the initial planarization step with 320 grit:

After my sequence of 10 polishing steps the hood was shiny again on the inside:

After taking care of the inside, I did the outside. This shows it in the condition as received:

And here the final result after polishing it back to translucency:

The final step was to install new rubber bumpers on this hood. They give it that happy 'thunk' sound when closing it against the wood plinth. Without bumpers the sound is much less dignified...;-). This shows one of the missing bumpers:

I drilled them out with a 2 mm bit: 

Then I installed O-ring snippets with some super glue

and cut them to size using a razor blade and a 3D printed template (~ 1mm keeps the hood horizontal when closed):

This shows the end result:

Beolovely! I will play this unit for a bit longer (I always enjoy restorations that include installation of my RIAA amplifier since it allows me to connect the Beogram to the Phono4 input of my Beomaster 6000!) and then it will be time to ship it back to its owner!