Beogram 8000: Opening the Beogram to Service Position

I don't think Bang & Olufsen intended for the Beogram 8000 owners to ever open their turntable into its service position. The factory authorized service centers would take care of that. These days however, owners that want to do simple maintenance on their Beogram 800x model turntables must open their turntables up themselves. A common task like installing a new belt for the tangential arm drive requires putting the Beogram into service position.

For the technician though, the Beogram service position is great. It really isn't that difficult and like most things, having the correct tools makes a big difference.

The first step (not pictured) is lifting off the platter.
Next, there are some important Beogram 8000 components to be familiar with in opening up the turntable to its service position. For reference this picture points out the suspension lockdown screw. There are three lockdown screws and they must not be in the lockdown position to open up the Beogram. There are also three leaf springs and hangers that make up the floating suspension of the Beogram. The suspension hangs from the Beogram deck lid that needs to lift up so you must disconnect and lower the suspension before the Beogram can be opened.

I use a special hook tool that makes it pretty easy to grab the suspension hanger. Holding the leaf spring down with a thumb or finger allows me to lift the suspension hanger up and over the mounting hole of the leaf spring.

Another first step (you could do this step prior to lowering the suspension) is to remove a couple of plastic trim pieces inside the Beogram deck. For the piece covering the dust cover hinge mechanism I use a small, plastic pry bar tool like you find now days for working on cell phones and tablets. It can pry pieces that snap together open without marring the finish.

The other trim piece is the plastic cover over the tonearm and fixed arm.

Although the suspension is disconnected (and lowered) at this point the Beogram lid cannot open yet because of two screws under the left side of the chassis that lock the lid down.

It is kind of awkward to get to those as you can see. I hang the Beogram over the edge of the table a bit to get to them.

The Beogram lid can now start to lift into service position but there are still a couple of very important steps. The lid must carefully be maneuvered at the left edge where it is free from the chassis lip. Once it is free to tilt (lift) you have to make sure that the deck will clear the fixed arm of the Beogram.

When the Beogram deck is in its normal position for use, the distance between the edge of the deck and the fixed arm is not enough for the deck lid to open. It will surely clip the fixed arm (which would not be good).

By design the turntable floating deck, that the tangential arm assembly is a part of, can be slid to the right a little bit so there is clearance for the deck lid to tilt.

If you look at the posts in the pictures below the bottom picture shows the posts have been slid over to the right.

Now there is clearance between the deck and the fixed arm.

The deck lid now tilts up from left to right into the Beogram service position.

Now it is easy to change the tangential arm drive belt or whatever you need to get to inside the Beogram.

One extra note...Be very conscious of the dust cover lid and tonearm compartment lid with the Beogram deck tilted up. Sometimes I secure them with painter's tape to make sure they don't accidentally get damaged. For major work on the Beogram I remove the dust cover and tonearm compartment lids completely. However, you also have to be very careful in doing that as I have come across quite a few Beogram 800x units where the mounts for the dust cover have been damaged by people not careful with their removal. Perhaps that would be a good blog topic by itself.

Beogram 8000: Dust Cover and Lid Repairs

Continuing the current Beogram 8000 restoration project...This turntable arrived with the metal deck lid already removed and the dust cover detached. The dust cover hinge assembly was all apart and the attachment hook piece that the lowering mechanism connects to was loose from the dust cover.

I re-attached the hook assembly to the dust cover using epoxy (quick dry this time). Originally this piece was attached with double-sided tape. The hook assembly needs to be attached to the dust cover and not loose in order for the dust cover raising and lowering to work properly.

Here are the leaf spring and sliding assembly that controls the raising and lowering of the dust cover.

The 2mm allen wrench is used to adjust the tension of the leaf spring so the dust cover can be left in any open position or all the way closed.

That is just right. I also installed new rubber bump pads where the dust cover contacts the deck.

Just as I did with the old double-sided tape residue on the deck, I removed the residue from the metal lid hinge attachment plate. I aligned the metal lid where it needs to go and created a hinge at the front using some painter's tape. This allows me to tilt the lid towards the front when I apply new double-sided tape to the rear hinge plate.

I discovered the metal door had no damping.  When the lid is lowered you are supposed to be able to let go and the lid will gently lower by itself. This lid just dropped down without any damping. All of the damping grease was gone.  Fortunately I have some damping grease for this application.  I have to use it on the lids of the Beomaster 8000, Beomaster 6000 and the Beocord 8004/9000 units.

I applied enough grease where the lid damping was in effect again. Now it works like new again.

Here is the completed dust cover and metal lid repair.

The dust cover and deck lid were the final pieces of this Beogram 8000 restoration. Normally I would be packing this unit up to send back to its owner. Unfortunately I had a couple of intermittent instances during the record play testing. The fault I observed was the Beogram tonearm went into the Pause position while playing a record. However, I could not find anything wrong by inspection. The tracking weight was fine, the cartridge is good and I had played quite a few records without a problem.

I decided to change the phono cartridge anyway and started another round of record play testing. After fourteen record albums (all the way through, side 1 and side 2), the problem finally re-occurred. This is not the type of problem you want to encounter. Will I have to wait another fourteen record plays to try and catch the fault?

After consulting my usual repair sources for ideas I have decided to start with the easiest and work my way down to the more difficult (opening up the Beogram again). So tomorrow I will recheck the forward << and reverse >> voltages in the control keypad. I might also try swapping the keypad assembly with one of my spares.