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Monday, December 20, 2021

Beogram 4000: A New Arrival from Germany En Route to California

I while ago I received a Beogram 4000 from Germany that was purchased by a customer in California. The task is to restore the unit and send it on to its new owner.

Unfortunately, the unit was not packaged properly, and the keypad plates came loose during shipping. This caused some minor damages to the plates themselves as well as some dings and scratches to other surfaces under the hood.

This shows the unit after extracting it from the packaging:

The aluminum surfaces are surprisingly o.k. considering the liberated keypad plates:
However there is a post glued to the main plate, which may have been used to mount a wet-play brush. We will need to see if this comes off without damage:
On the positive side the plinth is in pretty good condition with near-pristine corners up front:
The hood is in need of polishing, but does not seem to be cracked around the hinges, i.e. it could be polished back to a decent appearance.
The MMC mount is chipped. An often encountered issue with the 4000. It will need to be replaced with a reproduction mount:
After taking off the aluminum plates I found this:
The red position indicator is still o.k., which is great! They are often broken off or cracked:
As usual the plinth guidance washers are cracked:
Human creativity can be observed around the reservoir and motor capacitor section, where some units were replaced in a less-than-pretty way:
I also found the strobe light to be liberated from its mounting points on the bottom of the enclosure:
At this point I switched the unit over to 110V and plugged it in. Immediately, the AC platter motor started running and the strobe light came on:
Miraculously it survived transport despite being able to bang around inside the enclosure.
Other than these two signs of life, however, the deck did not respond to pressing any keys on the keypad. Also the scale and RPM trimmer illumination was completely off.
I checked the power rails and it turned out that the 6V rail was dead. 6V is used for controlling the functions of the deck via the hardwired control logic circuit inside the keypad cluster. Further investigation revealed that the reed relay that controls the non-AC motor 24V and 6V rails during startup only switched 24V, but not 6V. I jumpered the 6V relay and that brought back the control system. 
So far so good. It seems this deck is a decent starting point for a restoration.



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