Beogram 4004 (5526): A New Arrival from Maryland - A First Look

I recently received a Beogram 4004 (Type 5526) for a complete functional restoration from a customer in Maryland. This post makes a first assessment of the condition of the unit. The restoration process will be discussed in a follow-up post.

The unit arrived well packaged in a Beolover-supplied box and all went well. I extracted it and put it on the bench:

It is in pretty decent cosmetic condition. As so often the hood is fairly scratched up, but my customer sent a new reproduction hood along, which will be installed. I removed the hood:

The keypad is still in a pretty nice condition:

The plinth as well. It still has undamaged corners:

Unfortunately there is some minor scratching on the platter:

I removed the aluminum panels and had a look 'below deck':

The unit seems mostly unadulterated, which is usually a good start for a restoration. As usual, the transport lock bushings are degraded:

Luckily, there are custom made Beolover bushing replacements, which will be installed during the restoration of this Beogram. 

After this visual inspection I plugged the deck in and pressed start: The carriage started moving, found the LP setdown point and then activated the solenoid. So far so good! After the solenoid activated the carriage started moving towards the center of the platter. This behavior is consistent with a too aggressive carriage feedback setting.

Once the carriage hit the end of travel switch nothing happened anymore. This told me that most likely one of the H-bridge transistors was bad. Normal behavior would have been for the carriage to return back to its home position.

In summary, this promises to be a fairly straight forward restoration. Let's see if this assessment is correct!..;-). Stay tuned!