Bay Area Beogram 8002: Cabinet Work Completion to First Record Play

Today I finally got this Beogram 8002 turntable into a listening room to begin record play testing.

It took a little longer than I anticipated to finish up the reassembly to arrive at this point but I took a little detour to fix the chipped rosewood trim on the front panel.

A cosmetic repair of the trim was not originally in the plans for this restoration but the more I looked at it the more I didn't like leaving the front panel chipped like that.

The journey down the path of repair for something like this can end up taking extra time of course and this one certainly did. When working on repairs like this glue is involved so that means waiting time for glues to cure.

Then there are times where it takes more than one attempt to make the repair. That also happened here.

In my initial repair attempt I decided to just try and patch the areas that were chipped. In this case two...a large chip and a much smaller one.

The fit and install of the patch for the larger chip went well. I used a piece I cut out of some rosewood veneer I keep for this type of repair. The fit and pattern match was good.

After gluing the repair patch in place I cut off the excess, sanded the repair and applied some boiled linseed oil for a finish.

It should have been a nice repair but the small patch turned too dark and I realized that the small remaining chip was too small to make a good repair. Even if I just used some wood filler.

It didn't look terrible and was better than having the chips there but I decided I couldn't leave it like this.
The large patch fit good but darkened too much and my eyes kept being drawn to the small chip that still needed to be fixed.

My rework of the fix was to cut out the first repair attempt and make the cut so that there would be just one, rectangular patch piece needed to cover both of the original chips.

I selected a lighter section of rosewood from my veneer piece in the second attempt. 
Here is the result of the second (and final) attempt.

The patch piece still darkened but I think overall this patch is much better.  It is far from perfect but better than the original chips.

As a side note...I investigated using some rosewood trim from a spare Beogram 800x turntable cabinet that was beyond repair.  I also looked at some spare Beocord 800x and Beomaster 6000/8000 cabinets for possible donor trim pieces.  In all cases the cabinets I have in my spare parts collection are all darker than the rosewood trim on this project. So my veneer piece is as good a match as I could get.

Returning to the tonearm compartment, I installed the nice, clean replacement hinge piece for the lid.
I used kilopoise grease for the lid damping and temporarily held the hinge in place with the original hinge bar for this Beogram.

The Beogram 8002 cabinet is now ready to start all of the reassembling of its components.

The first steps were to put the main turntable components (circuit board, transformer, control panel and floating chassis) back into the cabinet.

I like to do that first because until those are in place I can't close up the two halves of the cabinet and I don't like having that loose when I work with the dust cover and tonearm compartment lid.

In my haste to do the reassembly I neglected to photograph the re-install steps this time but for reference, here are the install steps from the last Beogram 8002 project.

Here is this Beogram 8002 with its internal components installed and ready for the dust cover and tonearm compartment lid installation.

For the dust cover installation I prefer to secure the dust cover and tonearm compartment hinge assembly together with the Beogram 8002 bar hinge.  By removing the bar hinge at the beginning it saved me from removing the back plate of the cabinet that has the hinge bar mounts for the cabinet frame. Removing that plate can often result in a loose rear plate because it has plastic clips that easily break off.

After I had the dust cover and tonearm compartment pieces secured with the Beogram 8002 bar hinge I attached the dust cover damping spring assembly.

Here is the dust cover installed and with the damping spring set properly to allow slow lowering of the dust cover.

The dust cover has two rubber bumper pads that mount in the front part of the lid (where it rests when lowered all the way to the deck). Those rubber pieces are always deteriorated and broken off.

I cleaned out the original bumper pad residue and installed my own 3D printed bumpers.

The dust cover now becomes an alignment guide for installing the tonearm compartment lid.

I used the same 3M VHB double-sided tape on the tonearm compartment lid as I did for the Beogram 8002 metal deck.

Everything looks like it is installed and this Beogram 8002 is ready to play some records.

It is off to my office where I can listen to records on this Beogram while I work.
Tonight I was in the mood to hear some nice jazz recordings so I broke out Quincy Jones "Walking In Space" and Lonnie Liston Smith "Live!".  

Don't stay up.  These listening tests may take a while.

Beomaster 1900 Type 2904: Cosmetic repair - side trim replacements

Before reassembling this Beomaster 1900 for testing I took a little time to replace the two "wood" side trim pieces. Actually, the trim pieces on these Beomaster 1900 units are a plastic base to which a thin rosewood veneer is applied.

The rosewood veneer on this Beomaster has started to peel and has some unsightly damage. I had originally hoped to save it but there is just too much deterioration of the veneer.

There are areas where the rosewood is missing so just re-glueing what is left wouldn't do much good in my opinion. The plastic base pieces can be saved and reused in the future. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to find, cut and glue new veneer onto the plastic bases...but I'll save that for a future project.

On this project I am taking the two side trim pieces off a parts Beomaster 1900. It works out well for this project because my parts unit is missing its front trim veneer but the side trim pieces are perfectly intact.

Here they are installed on this Beomaster 1900.

Beogram 8000: Cosmetic Repairs

I left off in the last post for this project with the Beogram wood trim removed and soaking in GooGone to loosen the old mounting glue. The rosewood trim on the Beogram had started to separate in places and the only way to really fix it is to completely remove the trim, clean off the old glue, then reattach the trim.

Here are the pictures again of the removed trim soaking in GooGone.

After about an hour I can use a scraper to remove the old glue residue.

The old glue comes off pretty easy but the front trim piece was a lot more delicate than the sides. There were already places where the trim was starting to come apart. I repeated the GooGone process on the Beogram frame that the trim attaches to. Before re-attaching the trim I cleaned all of the mounting surfaces with acetone.

To remount the trim I used Tesa 4965 double-sided tape. It is very strong and worked really good on the front trim piece to keep the separating trim intact during the remounting.

Here is the front trim piece already mounted and the two side pieces prepared.

Here are the left and right corners after all of the pieces have been remounted.

The next step was to do some sanding and refinishing to bring the color back to the trim.

Here are some before and after pictures of three trouble areas on the front trim.

At certain angles you can see some scars but I think the trim looks good. I might give the front trim piece one more round of treatment but I want to put everything back together and get a complete look at it first.

Beogram 4002 Type 5513: Some Cabinet Work

This weekend I worked on getting the Beogram 4002 re-assembled with its cabinet trim and deck cover. I removed the rosewood trim so it would be out of the way and not be susceptible to accidental damage during the other restoration steps.

The rosewood trim attaches to a metal frame that slides out to unlock and slides in to lock the Beogram 4002 cabinet. The metal frame has five guide washers that are almost always broken on the Beogram 4002 units. This one was no exception. The guide washers are a special designed part as shown in this earlier Beolover post.

Here is this Beogram fitted with the Beolover 3D printed guide washer replacements.

At first you might think these can just be refitted with some flat washers from the hardware store. Why buy the special printed parts. I can tell you these guide washers make a big difference in properly assembling the Beogram cabinet. As you can see in the Beolover blog post, the guide washers mount in place to provide a proper guide for the cabinet locking frame to slide along.

As I was attaching the cabinet trim/lock I noticed the frame was separating from the rosewood along the front.

This had to be epoxied before I could continue. It is not a good idea to glue it in place. Glue can be messy and before you know it you have a crisis on your hands. Be safe and properly remove the trim piece to work on it independently.  I cover all of the rosewood with good painter's tape so I don't have to worry about scratches or glue residue on the finish.  This picture shows the glue areas ready to receive the epoxy.

You can't have too many clamps. A couple of years ago I found these little miniature clamps like the big ones I have in my workshop. They are great for small things like this.

For this type of gluing I like to use a slow drying epoxy so I don't have to panic in getting excess glue wiped off and making sure the clamps have everything aligned.  I let this dry overnight.

The next morning the trim/locking piece was ready to use. Now I could finish attaching it to the cabinet with the five guide washers.  It fits good and looks good.

Beogram 8000: Repairing The Aluminum Deck and Front Trim

It is time to clean off the old double-sided tape residue that held the Beogram aluminum deck in place and re-glue the deck down on the cabinet

These pictures show the old tape residue.

I like to use GooGone to soften up the old tape residue where I can just scrape it off. I let the GooGone set in place on the old tape for a couple of hours. This has to be done on the chassis under deck and the underneath side of the aluminum deck panel.

 When the old residue is scraped away I clean the surfaces so they will accept the new glue.

I have used new double-sided tape before in re-attaching these panels before but we have found the fit is better using epoxy with some #4 aluminum washers (used as spacers).  I placed them at the same attach points as the original tape.

I use thirty minute epoxy so it gives me time to apply the glue and adjust the panel correctly. I can clamp the panel down in three of the attach points but have to use some weights on the fourth.

The gluing procedure went well but I noticed that the front trim piece of rosewood veneer was separating from the Beogram case.

So much of the front veneer was separating that the only good solution here was to remove the veneer trim completely and clean all of the old contact cement off.

Once the trim piece and the cabinet base, where it fits, were clean I could reattach the trim piece with some new contact cement. This next picture shows the two parts clean and ready for contact cement to be applied.

Here is the cabinet with the aluminum deck and reattached trim piece.

I also cleaned out the base of the cabinet good and applied some anti-corrosion oil on the deck hinge.

Before adding the Beogram main components back into the cabinet I performed the service manual adjustment for the platter to arm height. The distance from the top of the arms to the surface of the platter should be 23mm. This turntable was initially at 21.9mm so it required some adjustment using screw "A" as shown in the picture here.

Now I could move the main Beogram components into the cabinet and give them a quick test.

Very nice. Now on to the tracking force calibration and the tangential arm tracking adjustment.