Thanks! Glad it works.

There was a time when I had to do a strange relay to connect to the Internet: Dial a 2nd phone set up in a friend's house, which call-forwarded to a university about 25 miles away, where I would log in and set up a ppp connection to the Internet. The friend with the 2nd phone line happened to be on the other side of an arbitrary line the telco drew on a map. His calls to the university were local while mine were long distance, yet we were each the same distance from the university.

Status update:

Pages through 220 have been uploaded. Pages 221 - 272 were scanned and will be uploaded tonight. Several of this batch had to be scanned in color (hydraulic diagrams for the Hydramatic transmission). Xsane handled the transition gracefully and it only required 1 extra mouse click to switch back and forth between grayscale and color. All other settings remained constant.

Besides the approximately 1-1/2 hours scanning each night, it takes about 1 hour to convert and resize the images (I offload this job to a computer nobody in the house is using), another hour or so to create extra, detail images, and about 1-1/2 to 2 hours to upload. That's about 2-1/2 hours of work per night where I have to be at the computer, and about 2-1/2 to 3 hours per night with the computer unattended. The whole thing will amount to somewhere around 60 - 70 hours.

Oops, forgot to update. If dreamhost.com ever gets their collective thumbs out of their collective butts and gets my website back up and running, I will be uploading pages 309 - 352. Just finished scanning. Had to film a high school football game and didn't get started until very late. Will have to do the detail images later.

The manual is finished. The PNGs occupy 5.6G and the JPGs on the website occupy 79M.

http://edge-op.org/1949_Oldsmobile/

Congratulations grouch. What a feeling of accomplishment you must have!!! What a great service to all 49 Olds re-builders. In the end how many hours did it take you? Also do you know what will it cost to rebind the manual? I checked it out again and what I read is completely readable. Very, very clear and crisp. Congratulations again grouch, you deserve it!!!!!!!

Thanks home brew. Maybe somebody will get some use out of it. Friday, Saturday and Sunday I was into 'press on regardless' mode. My guess is that the total time was somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 - 70 hours. Now that it's finished, I'm going to post a notice of it in General Rodding Tech.

Hi Grouch,

I have been scanning manuals for over 5 years and most are now on the Old Online Chevy Manuals site: http://chevy.tocmp.com Over 11000 pages so far.

For the larger shop and parts manuals, I separate the cover from the book. Scrape off the old glue from the binding edge. Then remove the metal staples from the binding which makes it easier to remove the pages which are usually in once folded sections consisting of about 15 sheets or 30 pages. After separating each section, lay each page flat on the scanner and use your imaging program. I prefer to use a dpi of 300 in gray scale for black and white and color for color pages. Save each scan in some kind of consecutive order. I usually save in .jpg format.

Make one page that is blank. Open each scanned page and copy the page excluding the edges of the page or scan and paste onto the blank page/image. Do any image clean up or editing at this time. Be sure to save as original name of your file. Once all your pages are scanned, edited and maybe formatted into your favorite browser, then it is time to put the manual back together.

Reassemble each section as original in order. I use 18 to 22 gauge stainless or aluminum wire for staples in the binding. Make the staples the same width as originals but leave them about 4 inches long. Next, take each section starting with the front and align onto staples using original holes. Once all the sections are in place on the staples, using a blunt tool such as butter knife, press down in the area of each staple to compress the sections. Next clip the ends of the staple about 1/8 inch and bend over to center of staple. Do the other the same way.

To reattach the cover, I use Weldwood Contact Cement. Brush some in the inside of the cover where it attaches to binding and brush onto binding. Let sit for about 5 minutes and line up and press together.

Many of the manuals I have reassembled had real rusty staples or the cover was already separating were in better condition than before I received them.

If you have any questions, drop me an email, khardy3830@yahoo.com and I'll try to answer them.

Hope this make sense.......

Good Luck and Cheers!

khardy:

The scanning and last of the uploads was completed 2006-09-10.

http://edge-op.org/1949_Oldsmobile/ shows details of my copyright records search, a summary of how the manual was scanned and an HTML version of the Table of Contents. The quick and crude php script used to page through the images is at http://edge-op.org/1949_Oldsmobile/index.phps and is GPL'd.

I am aware of the work at chevy.tocmp.com. The Fisher Body manual at http://chevy.tocmp.com/1949fisher/index.htm saved me a lot of head-scratching and skinned knuckles. (It wasn't enough to keep me from pulling a dumb stunt and breaking half of the split windshield on my Olds, but no manual can prevent that). The service you provide there was one of the inspirations to scan my shop manual and make it available.

You are welcome to take the scanned images and adapt them to the format on your site, as anyone else may. That is the most efficient way of getting them to you, as my dial-up connection would make it take 12 - 15 hours otherwise.

All of the JPEG images are in the directory http://edge-op.org/1949_Oldsmobile/images/ and are sequentially numbered. The numbers match the page numbers of the manual except for 000 for the front cover, 436 for the back cover, 437 for the spine, and the detail or rotated images. Each extra image uses the page number and "-#", where "#" is the count of the extra image for that page. There is no index.html in that directory so you can see all filenames.

All images were scanned at 600 dpi (actually, 236x236 pixels/mm) and saved in PNG format. These were then converted to JPEG and resized with 85% quality. This results in file sizes approximately 3 times what is typical on chevy.tocmp.com (and thus means approx. 3 times slower to download, also), so you may want to convert the resolution and JPEG quality to 200x200 pixels/in and 31%. I tried to keep them as high as I could stand to upload so future conversions would have a good starting image. They are far from ideal for browsing with a connection like mine.

If you are interested in the original 5088x6543 PNGs, I could put them on a couple of DVDs and mail them to you. They occupy about 5.6 G. I'm checking to see if bzip2 or gzip will compress them any.

Hi Grouch,

You did an excellent job of setting up the manual for all to use. The format you have used is about the same as Rusty's of The Old Car Manual Project, http://tocmp.com

When I first started putting manuals online, web space was of a premium. All the page images had to be reduced to accomadate the limited space thus losing some of clarity in the long run. Also, I never knew at the time, 5 years later, I would still be doing this. Really wished I had preserved some of the original scans. Many were lost due to changing computers, computer failures, etc. Now I back everything up!

Later in the week, I plan to added a few items to the Old Online Chevy Manuals, http://chevy.tocmp.com and will place a link to your manual. I would love to have a copy of your work on disk if possible, drop me an email, khardy3830@yahoo.com and I'll send you my snail mail address.

Hope you are encouraged to place online any other manuals you come across for your 49 Olds for future use.

Cheers!

Glad you guys finally got together.

Thanks! I didn't realize that about the format; just went with quick and easy.



My website hosting provider has increased the allotted disk space over 5 times what it was just 3 years ago, probably to keep users from going elsewhere. Hard drives just keep getting cheaper per GB. I think Project Gutenberg started out really scraping to get 5 MB to store zipped, all-caps plain text.



I want to repeat that you (or anyone else) are free to copy all of those images to create pages on your website. People are much more likely to turn to TOCMP than they are likely to find my website.

Email sent.



It's a tedious job, but the fact that you've done it and provide such a wonderful aid to so many old-car enthusiasts makes for a strong push to others to 'share what you got'. You've preserved and disseminated information that otherwise might have been lost over time. That's an excellent, laudable example to follow.

Me, too, but there wasn't any reason until those scans and uploads were finished. "Done" is just lots easier to work with than "I'm gonna".

Hey Home Brew, appreciate your letting me know about Grouch's new manual online. Glad for the company. I have placed a link on the Old Online Chevy Manuals and the Chevy Resources pages so others can find the 1949 Oldsmobile Shop Manuals 6 & 8

Hopefully others will come forth and either scan the pages, provide a manual or just put it all on the web. The more info out there, the better for all of us!

At this time, I have ten more manuals I recently bought to go through.....

Cheers!

At the rate I did 1, that would be about 100 days of scanning.

2 DVDs of scanned images mailed this morning. After the DVDs were burned and the package sealed, I discovered my scans of the fold-out, 2-page lubrication chart wouldn't fit together to make the complete chart. I rescanned and put them together to make one big 26 MB image: http://edge-op.org/scans/014c.png

The JPEG is at http://edge-op.org/1949_Oldsmobile/images/014-3.jpg and is still a whopping 452K.

I mirrored the 1949_Oldsmobile/ directory on the DVDs but have updated it since then with some text, a few images, a link back to here and links to tocmp.com and chevy.tocmp.com.

Hi Grouch,

The first two manuals I scanned took me months. Really didn't know what I was doing at first and took a lot of trial and error. This was in the day when the images had to be reduced to a few kilobytes.

The last big manual I tackled was the 1929 - 1954 Chevrolet Master Parts & Accessories Catalog with 1230 pages. Before starting on this manual, I had decided to keep a rough log of time actually spent setting it up. Came to a total of 88 hours over a one month period. Most of it was completed within 25 days or 83 hours, 45 minutes. Worked on it most days with a few hours here and there. Had to wait about 10 days before I had a good internet connection to upload to the web and that was another 4 hours, 15 minutes. This shows the Time and equipment/software used to produce the manual for the web.

Actually uploaded over 1800 pages to the Old Online Chevy Manuals site. During my 88 day trip to Alaska, I scanned the 271 page 1958 Chevrolet Parts and Accessories Catalog for Passenger Cars - Corvette - Light & Medium Trucks and added more info to the Model Identification page and made a bunch of smaller additions.

I have in the past been able to format and set up a 250 to 350 page manual in a matter of days, but those were cold and rainy out so didn't have much else to do anyway. With time, I have developed a routine that is easy for me to get this info online. Unfortunately, I have received some flak because I use MS and other software for the format I use. I look at it this way, I am taking my time to get this info online in a way that is easiest for me and hopefully easy for others to navigate. This has cost me a lot of money and time. Just spent over $250 in the last 6 weeks for the newer (old) manuals I have to do in the next bunch of months. The info is there if they really want to use it.

Most of the manuals I have on the back burner right now are less than 100 pages each with a few over 500+. Will probably tackle the smaller ones first. Takes a lot to psyche up for the big manuals.

I'll be on the lookout for the DVDs. Thanks! Found out I will be going back offshore real soon. Taking the vessel we used in Alaska from Seattle, Washington to Galveston, Texas via the Panama Canal. During this one month trip, I will probably put an hour or two daily into scanning for the site.

Cheers!