Maintenance Guides

[englishbull]

Personally, I think it is a good idea to have a help topic on a Forum. As John and others have mentioned, I have used this facility on other car Forums and have said myself not only time and money..............

Very useful, but agree it should only be accessable to Register Members......

[Alan Chatterton]

We have talked about Service notes being on CD and or Memory stick, but I can't remember what we agreed.

I'm all for helping people, but we must remember we are a club with members, and costs associated. If people can gain benefit from free access forums without being a member, they why would they join?

But, we need to balance this with helping people and not appearing to be defensive.

Tricky call, so keep the views coming, and I'll look into service notes on CD or stick.

Alan

[johnconradlee]

The Service notes are something I'm currently looking into. There are I think at most 2 or 3 copies left so now is the time for a revamp.
I quite like having something printed I can flick through, however I can definitely see the uses of a searchable digital version. I think the optimum might be to have a printed version with a CD wallet inside the front cover.
The problem is (at least according to Andy Roberts) that although they were typed in MS Word originally (in the early 90s) we don't have a complete "as printed" version correctly formatted which we can pdf. Ideally it would be nice to get someone with a lot of free time (or several people??) to re-edit it into a form that can be pdf-ed and at the same time incorporating in the supplement. Any volunteers?? I was wondering if we gave a chapter each out to the members and a 3 month deadline whether that would be the way to go, but organising & collating it all at the end could be problematic.
The other option is to scan in what we have and use optical character recognition to produce a searchable pdf. There are companies that will do this for a cost but the accuracy mightn't be that good.

[TedTaylor]

The Service Notes have not been updated for 13 years if I remember correctly which is understandable because of the work involved. Also with the increase in use of the Forum to seek solutions to problems perhaps the old book format is no longer relevant.

I am in the process of doing an up to date more user friendly Index to my Forum Notes from Six Appeal - which of course are therefore only available to members. I have all sixty 'editions' of the Notes on my computer ever since I started them (July 2009) and have often wondered about putting them into some for of Indexed usable form to make them easy to reference.

We could do this as an alternative or as an addition to an updated Service notes, and in any format required. I could even include diagrams of other info from Manuals etc in appropriate sections where it does not infringe copyright. Please note that I have some other things to get behind me first - RBRR not the least of them - before I would start on it if it was felt to be worthwhile.

Alan would this be useful and what do people think?

MUT

[David Withers]

It would be excellent to have repair/overhaul/service guides along the lines of the LandRover one that Steve linked to. A comprehensive series of guides would take quite a while to produce, but perhaps the potential subjects could be categorized and production of those felt to be most useful made a priority (but any 'low-priority' guide that comes to hand would not be excluded of course).

In my view, the guides should be accessible only by paid-up members of the Register. Whilst its pleasing that the Register strives hard - via the forum in particular - to help non-member owners of the big six Triumphs, we are a relatively small, low-budget, organisation and should not be expected to give away guides that will have taken members a lot of effort and know-how to produce. Access to high quality guides should in time become another of the advantages of membership, and thus help towards boosting Register numbers.

[Clifford Pope]

I think we should be helpful and inviting to non-members, up to the point of reasonable ad-hoc advice on specific problems. That's mainly an individual not a club thing.
But having the forum is also an ongoing advertisement for the further benefits of membership, so we should be open and friendly and helpful, but also gently plugging the other information available only to full members.

It is a tricky balance I agree. Some classic interests are entirely generated by a large online following and the club itself is a minority interest for a core who actually want to meet. But others are almost entirely led by the club, and there's really no point in trying to run the car if not in the club. In my experience Landrovers are in the first category and Stags in the second.
The register is probably somewhere in between.

[Mike Stevens]

I did a lot of the original work with the service notes, which were OCR'd and then corrected. There were a lot of common OCR issues that I wrote some software for to detect and correct, thus reducing the manual work load. Both Ann and I also helped copy edit them. Sadly, I doubt I have any of the original files left since the PCs have been upgraded a number of time since then!

As something I could do for the Register, I'd be happy to think about the task of scanning etc as required. However, how are they produced at present? Surely we have electronic copies which are printed, or are they just produced by copying a master hard copy?

(I also have all the Six Appeals going back to year dot!)

Making the service notes available in electronic form ought to be a high priority, maybe then it could be sold in 2 forms, with or without the hard copy. That would reduce John's workload as well as (probably) increasing the profit!

Funnily enough though, I don't actually have a copy of the service notes!

A 'how-to' section of the forum is a nice idea, but it will of course depend on input from everybody - just as Kevin relies on copy for Six Appeal from us all. I think it could be very useful but I'm undecided about limiting its access to just members....

Cheers,
Mike.

[Alan Chatterton]

Thank you for your offer to help Mike. Can I leave you and John Lee to talk to each other and see what can be done?

[johnconradlee]

Thanks Mike for the offer of help.
I had a bit of a play with the photocopier at work earlier and scanned and OCRed the suppliment as it is smaller and I had it to hand. The formatting is everywhere and it's riddled with mistakes but not as bad as I feared so certainly recoverable. Someone with better OCR software might do better.
I'm starting a new section in the "Members only" section - mostly because I want to put up links to scanned and OCRed bits of the Service Notes Supplement to show what we're up against! If Mike (possibly with some nifty programming) plus anyone else with an interest or who can spare even a few hours editing out the mistakes could please follow the topic over there.

Regards,

John

[Mike Stevens]

Alan - will do!

John - I'll look in the other section. Both Ann and I spent some time copy editing the notes last time and I'm sure will be happy to do it again. However, this time, let's try and and keep the electronic versions!

Cheers,
Mike.