Beogram 4000: A New Arrival From Germany - A First Peek

I recently received a Beogram 4000 from Germany for restoration. It came very well packaged. Double boxed and platter separately packaged! Awesome!:

 The inner box had a styrofoam liner into which the Beogram was placed:

This Beogram 4000 came with two cartridges, a MMC20 E and a MMC20 EN. They were packaged together into one container, and this did not work so well:

They shifted during transport and the cantilever of the EN hit the plastic shroud of the E cartridge. I carefully opened the box and removed the cartridges taking care that the EN cantilever did not advance further toward the E cartridge. Luckily the cantilevers seem to have survived this without  having been bent:

I placed the cartridges into two of my recently redesigned MMC boxes:

When closed they can be identified through a small window in the box lid:

They are safe now and I will test them during the restoration process. Hopefully they will still work!

Let's have a look at the Beogram! The hood is a bit scratched. Not too bad in this case, but it has the typical 'figure skating' patterns from cleaning it with too much force:

I removed the hood, and a Beogram 4000 in pretty nice condition emerged:

There is a small dent in one of the aluminum panels:

And unfortunately someone painted the plinth with black paint:

Whoever did this will spend some time in B&O purgatory (I imagine it as a place where they play the same digitally remastered Milli Vanilli tune over and over again for a few thousand years..;-). The owner of the Beogram supplied a 4002 plinth, which will be transferred to the 4000 metal plinth frame in the course of this restoration (unfortunately, 4000 and 4002 plinths are slightly different and cannot be exchanged directly). Under the hood everything looks pretty original as far as I can tell. 

The carriage pulley removed itself during shipping and I found it wedged under the sub-chassis:

I installed it again and turned the Beogram on. The strobe light is still working, which is great!:

The carriage started moving but was not able to find the set-down point for LPs, an indication that the carriage position switches are corroded (as usual). On the positive end, the platter motor seems to work well and all keypad buttons are working.

In summary, this seems like an excellent starting point for a full restoration. This Beogram 4000 will most likely look and work like new once I am done with it.