Beogram 4002 (5524): A New Arrival from Texas - A Wrong Hood and Some Blown Fuses

I recently received a Beogram 4002 (Type 5524) from Texas. The 5524 is a universal voltage 4002 DC motor version, i.e. carries the grid voltage switch on the bottom of the enclosure.

It arrived well-packaged in a Beolover-provided shipping container, and so no shipping damages occurred. This shows the unit as I received it:

If you are a B&O geek like myself, then looking at this picture will immediately tell you that there is something not quite right! The tint of the hood suggests 'Beogram 4000'! And indeed, a closer inspection of the aluminum trim on the hood revealed that this is actually a Beogram 4000 hood:

The later Beogram 4002/4 hoods are all grey tinted and not brownish like this one. I removed the hood, which was not bolted down and this revealed aluminum surfaces that are fairly decent. No mayor damages. Even the keypad is still pretty good, except a faint scrape in the upper center.

The plinth is also still pretty nice. The right corner has some minor damage at the bottom,

but the left corner is fairly pristine:

I removed the panels and platter. I immediately saw the large number of transport lock fragments distributed throughout the enclosure. Also, one of the hood bolt springs appeared lodged behind the left lock:

The other spring seems lost, but no problem: I have proper replacements for them. The overall impression at this point is that the deck is fairly original. No obvious 'creative' changes below deck:

I plugged the unit in, and pressed START. Nothing happened. Completely dead. I looked at the fuses and it showed that they both were burned out. In order to save fuses, I connected the deck directly to a bench power supply at the reservoir capacitor leads:

I slowly ramped the voltage up to 30V (make sure the negative lead is connected to the black wire and the positive to the white one if you try this at home) and the current stayed in the low 10s of mA range, indicating that they fuses must have blown during some 'intervention' where a short was caused.

This finally brought the deck to life. After pressing START the platter motor started rattling (indicative of dry bearings), and the arm moved to the LP setdown point where the solenoid tried (unsuccessfully) lowering the arm. So it seems the electronics are probably mostly o.k., and it has the usual hardened lubricants that prevent the arm lowering mechanism from actuating.

Now fairly confident that they would not burn out immediately, I put two 250mA slow-blow fuses into the fuses box,

plugged the deck in and then started it again. It worked exactly the same as when powered by the bench supply. 

In summary, it seems that this 4002 project should be fairly straight forward. Stay tuned for the restoration report.