Beogram 4000 Packaging for Shipping: An Update on How to Secure the Carriage

This post is about a change to my packaging instructions for Beogram 4000, 4002, and 4004. I now recommend securing the carriage by using an M3 screw to bolt the carriage directly to the floating chassis (instead of taping the arms cover to the aluminum platters as shown in our videos). 

The reason for this change is that the Beogram 4000 I recently restored came well packaged, but the arms cover suffered unnecessary damage to its labeling:

Sadly, the 'no-residue' Blue Tape that was placed over it to hold the carriage in place during shipping damaged the labeling when I removed the tape. While I point out in my shipping instructions to place some cut to size paper under the blue tape for protecting any labeling from 'lift off', it keeps happening. And it seems that the arms cover has the most vulnerable lettering of all, potentially due to its different aluminum surface finish. It is not brushed like the other aluminum surfaces, and much smoother. 

I recently learned that all Beograms came out of the box with a screw installed that firmly locked the carriage to the floating chassis during transport. Sort of an additional transport lock for the carriage. Unfortunately, the original screws seem to have mostly gone missing. I have never seen one. They probably get lost since they need to be removed completely during the setup of the turntable.

For this reason I came up with a modern replacement, which I will supply from now on with my Beogram shipping containers:

My carriage lock screw fits into the M3 threads that are located under the small hole in front of the solenoid (the bolt threads point to the hole in the picture below):

BTW: This looks identical in many 4002s (the 4004 does not seem to have this feature), just check out the gap between solenoid and PCB.

The carriage lock screw should be bolted down until some resistance is felt, but not too hard. Just enough that it will not come loose during transport. The solenoid wires may need to be pushed aside a little bit when bolting the screw into place.

This shows it installed:

The head clears the aluminum panel by about 2 mm when the bolt is screwed down all the way:

After this is done, it is not necessary anymore to tape the arms down like I showed in my packaging video (please, note that the strip/foam at the end of the arms are still necessary):

If you do not have a suitable M3 screw at hand, you still need to do the tape, but please make sure you put a strip of paper under the blue tape where the lettering is!