Beogram 4002 (Type 5513): A New Arrival from California - First Assessment

I recently received a Beogram 4002 (Type 5513) from a customer in California. It traveled in a Beolover provided shipping container and so everything went well with the shipping process. This post discusses my first assessment of the unit. This is the unit as extracted from the box:

The deck is in decent cosmetic condition, but it has the usual finger marks on the keypad:

There are also a few minor scratches in the main aluminum panel:

The plinth corners are fairly pristine on the other hand:

The hood broke loose from the hinge at the bolts:

Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence caused by stress from the flat head bolts sunk into the plexiglass. This results in lateral stress, which over the years causes cracking of the plastic. Luckily, new hoods are now available from the beoparts-store in Denmark.

After I removed the aluminum panels

I found a fairly original setup without major evidence of previous human interaction. But I found a bunch of fragments from crumbling transport lock bushings next to the DC platter motor:

This was confirmed by the complete absence of said bushings from the locks:

The plinth guidance washers had already been replaced with regular washers:

This is less than ideal since normal washers do not guide the plinth.

After this visual inspection I plugged the deck in and pressed start. The carriage started moving and the platter motor came alive with a rumbling noise, indicative of dry bearings. This is almost a to be expected issue with these decks as the motor bearings usually ran dry after many years of usage. On the positive side the arm stopped at the LP setdown point, indicative of a working carriage position detection system.

In summary, I think this will be a straight forward functional restoration. Stay tuned!