Beomaster 4400 Type 2419: Final Reassembly and some final restoration tasks

This has been a marathon of a Beomaster 4400 restoration. Every time I thought I was ready for the home stretch some new problem would pop up.

With the testing out of the way this Beomaster has been playing constantly without any issues what-so-ever. So it is finally time to wrap this project up. Of course there were a couple of final repairs I had to make for this project to be complete.

The first was a known issue regarding the lenses for the slide controls. The old lenses were badly yellowed and foggy. I had already ordered a replacement set from Martin Olsen at Beoparts.

You can see how dark the background is in the picture above through the original lenses. The replacement lenses show what they should look like.

Reassembly of these components is a little tricky. The metal parts are very thin and probably had some special tool to mount them on the plastic slider at the factory. As such I found it very difficult to reattach them without any metal tabs breaking off. I ended up enlisting the aid of some very thin, double-sided tape (the kind used in modern cell phones) to put them back together.

The next issue was deterioration of the Beomaster 4400 cabinet feet. Almost all of the Beomaster 4400 units I have seen have feet that look like these.

You can see that there is also an accompanying rust problem.

This is the only part of the Beomaster cabinet that has any rust so I think the problem starts with the mounting screws of the feet.

I removed the old feet, sanded the rusty spots away, then spray painted the base plate (both inside and out).  I didn't want to lose the original wording and graphics on the cabinet base so I taped them off.

The rust is gone so I moved on to attaching the new feet.

The new feet have metal sleeves for the attachment screws so the screws don't compress the rubber as they are tightened. I threw the old feet and old screws away and used new mounting screws for the new feet.

The third and last issue I had to deal with was a broken FM tuning dial catch for the FM tuning slider.
All of these Beomaster 4400 units have a hard, brittle piece of glue that attaches the FM tuning slider to the tuning cord.

If you are careful with it the hardened piece of glue will remain on the cord and can be reused.
In this case it was too brittle and broke off.

There is not enough there to fit into the FM tuning dial catch.

The broken catch is always a blob of glue so I think the factory determined the position of the catch, set the tuning dial fork there and glued them together.  Whatever the type of glue they used was it does not bond to the slide control fork so it can be removed for service.

Over time however, those glue pieces break.

Looking for a solution that does not involve any permanent gluing to the slider fork I came up with using a small nylon washer and some epoxy to build me a new catch.

I marked either side of the tuning cord with a red marker before I removed that last remnants of the old glue piece.  That gives me the location for my new catch.

I used JB Weld fast drying, dark gray epoxy so I could easily see it.
I ended up having to cut some of the bottom part off because the catch was a little too big.
Note that this task is really something that should be done prior to having reassembled the Beomaster.
At this point though, I did not want to go through a whole disassemble and reassemble operation.

In the end my makeshift catch does a good job.

It fits into the tuning slider fork and the FM tuning slider operates the main FM tuning great.

Finally I could finish the reassembly of the Beomaster 4400 and get on with the best part...some listening tests.