Beogram 4004 (5526): Restoration of the Plexiglass Hood and a New DIN5 Plug

The restoration of the Beogram 4004 (5526) that is on my bench is almost finished. Today was hood polishing day. This usually means a nice workout at the work bench in the garage with some sand paper and polishing compound. Fun! This shows some of the scratches on the hood as received:

If one can feel the scratches with a fingernail, the hood needs to be sanded first to create a homogeneous surface. The scratches of this hood required a few minutes of sanding with 320 grit for equalization:

Once all the scratches are gone, it is time to roll up the sleeves and polish it back to translucency. This requires 8-10 steps of ever finer sand paper finished up with polishing compound. This is how the hood looked about 2 hrs later:

Pretty shiny, but of course not as perfect as a new hood.

The final step of a hood restoration is always the renewal of the rubber bumpers, that make sure the hood closes with a happy sound. As is the case with most Beograms at this point in time, the bumpers were broken off:

They can be replaced with pieces of 2 mm O-ring that are glued into the original cavities. But first the old rubber needs to be removed with a drill bit:

 Then the O-ring snippets can be glued in:

And trimmed to about 1 mm length once the glue has hardened:

With the final result looking like this:

After the hood was done, I moved on to replace the original oxidized DIN5 plug

with a modern all-metal DIN5 plug with gold plated contacts:

Beolovely! All this Beogram still needs before I can give it a spin is a few adjustments.