ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
This was my dad's, he was the only owner. It came to me when he passed a few months ago. I cleaned it up carefully and made sure everything worked right, so that it was in perfect operating condition when I made the mistake of listing it on eBay. I was hoping I could use the proceeds towards restoring a Beogram 6002 that has been sitting in my “to-do” closet for too long.
The auction ended successfully, I packaged it carefully and sent it to the buyer in NYC. Easy peasy, right? Of course not. Two weeks after the sale, the buyer contacts me to return it. He gives a variety of wholly fictional and/or ridiculous reasons for why it was “not as described in listing.” E.g., “not what I expected for the price”, “doesn’t receive FM stations well”. Since I had said explicitly in the listing that I didn’t accept returns, I respectfully offered to refund his shipping costs while pointing out I could neither control his RF environment nor his expectations. Silly me.
It turns out, buried deep in a help page, eBay’s seller policies are such that if a buyer claims “not as described in listing”, the seller MUST accept the return. Oh, and pay the return shipping too. Oh, and an Ebay “return fee” that was 25% of the sale price. Lucky me.
You can guess what happens next. My “buyer” returned the unit poorly packed, wrapped in a sheet of bubble wrap and stuffed into a box 1” too short. Unsurprisingly, the cassette section was now completely non-functional. Dead. Great, now I have a yet another project in my “to do” closet and I’ve paid dearly for the opportunity. Happy me.
Off to the bench… I disassembled it to expose the cassette mech. Everything seems largely intact, but when I turned the motor by hand, it felt rough and it’s cogging. I’m guessing it will need replacing, which doesn’t look hard and, given that this was a common, Japanese mech (Hitachi? I forget), shouldn’t be hard to find parts for. Optimistically, I cleaned and blew out the motor.
While I was in there, I treated the belt and cleaned the switches and pots with Deoxit. I also glued back together a broken eject damper anchor and I restrung the damper. After reassembly, the cassette now works, but it is loud and sounds labored. The cassette buttons are balky and sometimes take a few tries. If cassettes are your thing, I’m pretty certain you’ll want to rebuild/replace the motor, belt, etc. or just swap out the mech.
Otherwise, it’s still in good condition. Near perfect cosmetically. A few scuffs on the tape door/programming door and on the bottom and back of the unit. Aux input works. FM is strong. All lettering is perfectly intact. Battery compartment is clean and corrosion free. Antenna is straight.
No reasonable offer refused, buyer pays actual shipping from Portland, Oregon, USA. But if no one wants it, I hope this sad story helps some folk understand the risk they’re taking on when they sell on the ‘bay. Personally, I will never list vintage electronics there, or anything of value really, ever again. Thanks for reading.