Beogram 4000: From German Ebay to Tampa via Hong Kong Poorly Packaged

I recently received another Beogram 4000, which was purchased by a customer from Hong Kong on German ebay. Unfortunately, it was not packaged very well and sustained a fair bit of shipping damage. The damage is particularly sad since the unit appears to have been in excellent condition pre-shipment, which is pretty rare these days in the Beogram 4000 department. If you ever wonder how to package a 4000 properly, check out our packaging video on our 4000 page. Anyway, here are a few first impressions:

The platter was not secured and it created a bit of havoc under the plexiglass hood while bouncing around in transit. The hood has some severe scratches on the inside, which may not be entirely polishable since they go out to the edges. It also banged into the arms, which are now at an off angle:

 There are some black streaks on the aluminum panels, which I hope can be removed with Mr. Magic Eraser Pads. The platter itself split into its two components:

I removed the aluminum plates and the platter and had a look below deck:

Of course the spindle pulley came off when the platter banged into the arms:

On the positive end, the precious red position indicator survived the ordeal:

There is a bit of 'human intervention' visible:

A very unprofessionally installed supply capacitor. Whoever did it essentially cut the contact tab of the expired capacitor off and then soldered a new non-fitting radial cap to it. Savages!

I switched the unit to 110V and turned it on. The strobe light is working...some good news!

The AC platter motor is barely running. This may have to do with a bad motor phase shift capacitor or is simply a poor adjustment of the AC oscillator amplifier. 

A bit of good news here is that the plinth of the deck is in very nice shape. The front corners are pristine, which is pretty rare:

The bottom line here is that all this mess could have been prevented if the German knucklehead would have listened to our advice. He must have assumed that packages are always carried upright by white gloves wearing people who really care (so called WGWPWRCs)...in summary, this Beogram can probably be restored to something close to its original glory, maybe a few parts need to be procured from a donor unit to make it really shine.