updated
February 16, 2004
Scan some materials! Scanning is, by far, the hardest part of the whole process. If you have a scanner, scan the pages at about 150 dpi and save each page as a jpeg or png file, with minimal compression, and email it to us. (We don't mind big files!) If you've got a large amount of material, we can also set up FTP access for you. Contact us for more info.
Share your stuff We would love to borrow your manuals and scan them. Sometimes, if there's a bit of spare change one of us will buy a manual (you should see my bookshelf!). If you would like to lend us a manual, drop us a line.
Link to us By putting a link to oldcarmanualproject.com on your site you can help us reach a wider audience. You can also copy the banner below and paste it onto your page:
Make a donation Now, you can make a donation through PayPal to help us grow this website.
If you enjoy the content we provide and would like to help us provide more, please consider making a donation to support the site. Your financial support will help to pay for our internet connection, acquire materials, cover postage expenses etc.
The Old Car Manual Project started out in 2000 on free web servers, but because those carry ads (which can be annoying) and generally don't have much space available, most of the site is now on our own server. Also, in late February of 2004 the old main index page which was free-hosted on geocities is becoming www.oldcarmanual.com. This part of the project resides on a commercially hosted (yahoo) server. Some of our content will resie there in order to speed up access to some of the main pages.
The server for the oldcarmanualproject.com website is an Athlon 1400 running Apache 2.0 under Win XP Pro. It is connected to the net via ADSL, with about 768 kbps nominal upload bandwidth, though we've often clocked over 900 kbps. Go figure. Right now there are over 2 gigabytes on the site. We've been adding several megs a day, on average. The physical location is in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Dusan Ristic-Petrovic (aka Rusty) is the webmaster.
Also in Rusty's living room/office (his wife is very tolerant) is a new computer which will run the forum, classified ads and search functions someday soon. It's an Athlon XP2800+ using PHP and mySQL
Most of the items on the site have been scanned and sent in by Old Car Guys, and these are all identified with the name of the person. A few items have appeared anonymously or came from newsgroups or other locations on the web. Some things, especially in the early days of the website were scanned by Rusty, the webmaster; these don't have any attribution on them.
I plan to get back to scanning soon. Here's some of my recent acquisitionsI that are waiting to be scanned:
Reference Manual: "What Makes it Tick" subtitled "Elementary Information for Automotive Technicians" published by General Motors, ca. 1940(?)
Old magazine ads 1938 to 1948
1964-65 Buick Special Parts Catalogue No. 654A
1963 Rambler Technical Service Manual
Oldsmobile Parts Catalog 1958-1968
...and about 6' of shelf space worth of other literature
First and foremost, the Old Car Manual Project is a library: a central place where anyone can come to get the information they need.
How this happens is by volunteers scanning their hard-to-find documents into a digital format, so that everyone can have access to the information in them
Why are we doing this?
Why not? But really - one of the hardest parts of restoring or servicing old machines is getting decent technical information. Often, it's difficult, impossible or expensive to obtain. We think that this kind of information should be freely available, as a public resource for the preservation of our industrial history.
Who are we?
We are some Guys Who Like Old Iron. We can be contacted here
Is there a commercial interest behind this?
No. This project is non-profit. Our philosophy is that technical information which is already in the public domain should be available for free on the web. After all, that is what the "Information Superhighway" was supposed to be all about in the first place - information.
Who pays for this?
Well, hopefully, you do! We ask that you make a donation if you find this a useful service or if you just enjoy looking at the pictures. A lot of guys worked long and hard to scan the materials on this site.
It costs money to keep the site online, and most of that is paid for out of pocket by the webmaster (Rusty) himself. Not that we're complaining, but it would be nice if a quarter-million annual visitors could cough up enough to pay for the internet connection, at least! (Donations in 2003: $70 total, 0.00028 cents per visitor)
Do you sell stuff?
Not much. We are currently selling DVDs of old car movies, and we plan to set up a classified ad section with a nominal charge for ads.
The reason is to raise money to keep this thing going and to make it better. We have no corporate or government sponsorship, nor do we want any.
Who are the Old Car Guys?
Click here for a partial list of the contributors to the site.
