I found this poor machine for spares or repair on eBay, for £40 delivered. This style of machine holds a special place in my heart as my mum had a Beaver 2 which she bought new a couple months after I was born and I grew up watching over her shoulder as she was making things. A Beaver 4 in need of some love was something I couldn't pass up.

This example was in pretty rough condition, it had a sticky yellow film all over it (it's from the 70s/80s so not unlikely it came from a smoking home), it turned on at full speed, wouldn't turn easily by hand or at all with the motor and the plastic around some screws had broken. For some reason, the pin that holds the extension table was glued into the body backwards too.

I'm a tinkerer with my formal education in mechanical engineering, I'm in my happy place when taking something mechanical apart and fixing it! The full-speed issue was simply the suppression capacitor in the pedal failing short, so a new 0.022uF X2-class capacitor fixed that. The stiffness was just a belt eating itself with one of the liberated belt cords wrapping itself around the motor pulley and jamming it up. The cracks and tabs were easily glued back together. I knocked the glued in pin back out from the inside using some percussive maintenance and correctly put it back into the table extension with the grub screw. I gave it a good strip down and clean, it now smells fresh, with a slight aroma of grease and oil which is one of the best smells in the world, also the surfaces are no longer sticky. It's almost fully fixed, I'm just waiting for the replacement belts to come from AliExpress and I need to 3D print a new rubber foot in TPU as one was missing. The last image shows the current state, it still has a few knocks and chips but that's just character, I can't wait to use it for MYOG projects like pouches and potentially a backpack or two for me and our girls.

Frister + Rossmann Beaver 4 - Brought back to life