Lister Engine Forum
Lister Engines => Lister Market Place (things for Sale) => Topic started by: AdeV on September 08, 2019, 08:13:40 AM
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Hmm, we could probably do with some kind of document store attached to the forum... I'll have a poke around t'interwebs this week, see if I can find something suitable.
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Hi AdeV, a library of old service/maintenance manuals would be a godsend and a huge draw to this forum. I doubt there would be issues with copyright or patent infringement as most of the engines we are interested in are 50 years old or more. There are plenty of online sites where these manuals can be purchased for a small consideration. I suspect that LEF members have purchased a lot of these over the years and would be only to happy to share their manuals if there was a facility for doing so. If properly set up and regulated it might even provide a small income stream to help fund the LEF into the future. For example I would donate a full Lister ST workshop manual, a member wanting to know how to time a new or renovated injector pump could read how to do it for nothing, if they want to print a copy of the relevant pages there would be a fee of 10 cents per page. I do not want or wish to monetarist the LEF but personally I would be only to happy to cough up 50 cents for the information I want/need.
I have managed to email copies of various manuals to LEF members, the problem is that any emailed document over 25 megabytes gets bounced back. There are third party programs like dropbox that allow the sending of larger files. In the past I have had to print off the relevant pages, then scan them, before emailing them to members. This very time consuming and wastes a lot of ink and paper
I would recommend that the files be stored in PDF format with members able to view the manuals and have the ability to only print off just the few pages that are relevant to their particular problem.
The biggest problem with any forum that sells anything is that these transactions take place online and are susceptible to hackers and etc. I would prefer that we give the information away for nothing, rather than storing members personal details and credit card/paypal details, only to find the information has been stolen by a bunch of unworthy scumbags at a later date.
Bob
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Of course it would be easy to add a donate button for paypal. That goes to a secure off site web page nothing is stored on the sites server. I donate to a couple of mad causes without issue.
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Hi All
IMMO, manuals must be available just for members - that is sharing info - forget anything related to money. Don't bring issues to the forum.
This could be the LEF library - linked to the cloud, uploaded on request, downloaded at will.
PDF? off course... what else!
Have a suuny day
VP
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Thank you Johndoh, Paypal might be the way to go, I know that a lot of sports and social clubs use it to crowd fund local institutions and facilities.
My only worry with this is that the moment money is involved we will then expect AdeV to organize an annual audit, pay the auditors, submit tax returns to the governments of any and all jurisdictions that contributed and etc. It could easily turn into a huge secretarial/accountancy nightmare that cost a fortune and returns nothing.
Probably easier to set up a file sharing site and do it for nothing. If, after a few years, we are getting a million hits a year then we could start introducing a small fee to pay for administration.
Bob
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Hi VP, I think an LEF library is exactly what is needed but it would take a lot of organization and time to administer it, so that it was available in an easily indexable way.
I suspect that AdeV has better things to do with his day than catalog 100,000 old service manuals. I hope I am wrong and that he is up for it but I have my doubts. :)
Bob
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If you look at the amount of manuals on the internal fire page there's a lot of work involved. They ask only for a one time donation to access any/all of them. For example I threw a few quid in the collection plate in church this morning, its a donation, you don't have to give anything and donating doesn't give you any rights to the internal workings of the church. I assume the money collected helps with heat light and maintenance etc same as a site needs money spending on it from time to time. I'm also a donor to the French car forum uk. I have uploaded a few manuals to dropbox my internet is slow and patchy so not ideal
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Hi Bob and All members
I do not want to discuss academic graduations, which would be very bad among you, because our diuscussion here - the original one - are really old engines.
I think I am one of the youngest in LEF, but I must respect the "gerontics" that "now" in there retirement will have more time to devote to these things.
I can, and should, help you with whatever you need to do within my power.
Just take a look at the Peter & Rita Forbes website. Do they have a computer engineer to handle the site?
I think I made my point.
Cheers
VP
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I split this thread out into a separate document (I may later move it too)... as it's gone way OT for the original thread, but deserves discussing in its own right.
First up - money. I don't intend to monetise this in any way. I see this is a resource for members - and, possibly, block it to members who have posted less than "N" posts and/or been members for less than "X" days/weeks... or maybe not, after all, it might well be a draw for new members as Bob said.
Second - ideally, it'll be handled through the forum itself, if there's a suitable plug-in for SMF. If not, then something that can be hosted alongside the site would make the most sense.
Third - format. Yeah, PDF for the full manuals without question. However, if I can round up any volunteers, who would be happy to pick the PDFs apart, then I'm thinking a Wiki-style site (which is indexable and searchable), certainly for more popular manuals might be worth a shout. However, if there's one thing that's certain, there's no way I can find the time to look after such a thing! So definitely need volunteers for that one. The other thing a Wiki gives us, is the possibility to create our own manuals - e.g. where original information is unobtainum; or as a result of hard-won experience (I'm looking at you Listeroid boys in particular here). How useful would that be? Again, with suitable volunteers, I'd say we pick apart the "wall of knowledge" forum (which is not well used, and not user friendly IMHO), but also the sub-threads that appear in various other forums, some going back 10 years or more, and convert that knowledge into article form. I reckon that'd really start bringing people in. Again, I'd tie access into the forum, so you have to be a member to view the wiki. Think Wikipedia, but on a way WAY smaller scale!
As far as cash is concerned - fear not! This, and one other, forum co-exist on the same server, in a data centre in London (IIRC), which costs me around about US$25/month including full daily backups. So I'm really not worried about funding. I think we (and the other forum, and all the other gubbins I run on the server) uses about 2% of our monthly bandwidth limit as well, so we've got some room for growth too! In fact, the biggest hassle is disk space; and I should have that solved soon, we're eligible for a free upgrade which will make the server faster, and double the disk space available to us. Plus I can always buy add-on disk space for a few bucks a month.
VP - the Peter & Rita Forbes site is an interesting one - it was a lifelong passion of Peter's, but the site itself is a very "traditional" style HTML based site (of the mid 1990s style). Extremely compatible with any old device, but also a pain in the arse to maintain. Unfortunately, now that Peter has passed away, it's unlikely it'll ever be updated again. I presume Rita now owns it, but since the Stationary Engine Forum effectively disappeared after he died (he was the driving force behind that forum), I can't imagine his website will survive for many more years.
And, since I'm rambling... I suppose Bob, Andrew and I should sit down and work out what we do if, god forbid, any of us kick the proverbial bucket... I think all three of us are currently essential to the ongoing survival of this forum, so it's something I'll try to get sorted with the chaps for the future. Although frankly, I intend to live forever (just not necessarily on this planet), so we shouldn't have too much to worry about yet!
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I have a PDF editing program, which can pare down a large PDF to a much smaller size, with no loss from the original PDF. (it's newer stuff, not the generic scanner app or adobe writer.)
So any PDF's over 20mb, could be loaded to www.wetransfer.com and I could take a crack at shrinking them down to manageable sizes
Mike
PS my vote for members only.
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Hi Mike, a PDF editing suite that removes all the unnecessary padding out of files sounds too good to be true. I will have a play with wetransfer and see how it goes.
Hi AdeV, I have thought for a while that the Lister Engine Forum is a little too limited in its scope of engine advice. I have personally posted quite a lot of stuff about other engine manufacturers both diesel and petrol. I have also tried to post some stuff about generator heads and how they work. I keep getting asked the same questions by different members and have to reply to them and explain the same stuff over and over again. A Wiki style information base could work well but neither you or I have the time to do it.
In Australia we have an organisation that runs what are known as men`s sheds. These are primarily designed to provide a safe environment in which our retired men folk can interact with each other and have social interaction with each other while doing something useful for the community and passing on their years of accumulated knowledge to the next generation. The larger men`s sheds have milling machines, lathes , welding equipment and etc while the smaller sheds make cuddly toys for the local hospitals and schools. I am certain that this organisation would be only too happy to get involved in archiving the engine history that they grew up with. They might be slow but they will be keen, diligent and free. They also probably have hundreds and hundreds of old engine manuals on the shelf at home.
Bob
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Add me to the workforce, my health is about to make me redundant, so it would be good while i still remember.
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Thank you OSM, sorry to hear you are about to join me on the ageist economic scrap heap, lets hope we can both live long enough to start claiming the pensions we paid for and then another thirty years to get our money back.
While we are claiming, we should give as much as we can of our accumulated knowledge back to the community, we should also trying to ensure the lazy,greedy,profiteering do not benefit from our hard work, knowledge and experience.
So far we have two volunteers for the LEF old machinery library, what are the rest of you guys going to be doing?
Bob
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I only have following manuals
Lister SL/SR 1&2
Lister LT/LV 1&2
Petter A series AA1, AB1, AC1, AC1Z. AC1ZC & AC2
Yanmar L48-L100
Lister 6/1, 8/1, 12/2 and 16/2 operators manual and parts list
Honda E1500 manual
May be a Yanmar parts list somewhere too willing to forward all of them
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You beauty, I have manuals for a lot of older Australian engines, cooper, southern cross, moffat virtue and etc + a lot of Lister stuff. We need to get AdeV to organize a depository.
Bob
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I've no idea what I can do, 'cos I'm sure I'm the most technically inept bloke on here, by a country mile.
Whilst in the UK for a couple of months, on a hover barge project the management tried to slope the job card system on me, It's a bespoke system for 25 or so vessels in the companies fleet and they thought as I was 'lightly loaded' I'd be the ideal bloke. After two days of ragging the help desk to bits I got it set up, then, having download the manual, printed it off and stuck all the bits of A4 in a 'pocket' type folder I was no nearer populating the bloody thing. The publishers of the system said it was an 'aide memoir' for those who had done the course, £1800 for the day, plus hotels and travelling. This was deemed too expensive, on a $28,000,000 project. On the theory that if I wasn't worth educating I wasn't going to struggle so I got even more confused and buggered up a few emails on Outlook before getting the office printer stuck on A3. Some other poor fool now has it........
Should there be a slot for me removing the staples prior to scanning let me know, the hover barge job is way behind and I won't be going back for trials 'til January.
Cheers
Stef
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OK... well... that's me told then ;D I'll see what I can come up with as an interim PDF store, with a Wiki to come later. I need to figure out how to attach it to the LEF user database, so only members can access it.... means re-learning PHP!
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Brilliant idea please do it. If these are of any interest all in PDF format I will donate them to a free LEF library.
4 CS engine manuals years 1936 1938 1953 and finally 1971.
2 CS engined startomatic manuals 4.5kW 1969 and 2.5kW 1952.
Book 583-167 Diesel generating plant for VA. 6/1, 8/1, 12/2 and 16/2.
Book 584-367 Diesel generating plant Push button remote controlled for VA 6/1 etc.
Book 585-267 A.C. Automatic remote control generating sets for VA 6/1 81 12/2 etc.
Book 213-539 Alternator sets 15 K.V.A.
Book 680-1264 Startomatic air cooled generating set with HA2 air cooled engine.
Book 442-163 1.75kW to 4.5kW AC generating plants Types SL air cooled diesel.
Book 495-956 1,5kW A.C. Startomatic Electric generating plant
CAV Fuel injection pumps
CAV Fuel injection nozzles and holders Instruction manual for models S T U & V
Mick
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Thank you Listeroil, we just have to wait for Adev to set things up and we should be good to start uploading old manuals. I hope he can come up with something simple with a good indexing system that will allow users to easily find the information they need.
Wish this had been suggested before I went to the Macksville rusty iron rally, there was a guy there with 500 or more old engine manuals, I might have had to buy the lot! :laugh: My local agricultural spares dealer has a huge collection of old manuals, I might have to pay them a visit and offer to convert them to PDF for free, provided I get to keep a copy.
Bob