How to Contribute
We are looking for high quality scans, made with a flatbed scanner at 200 dpi or higher, in a jpg or other format with minimal compression. The idea is to produce an archive that will be useful for many years to come. All files will be posted on the site in jpg format.
You can upload your scans to our self-serve upload site, oldcarlibrary.com or you can send scans via email to rusty@oldcarmanualproject.com. Files may be archived in a zip or equivalent file if you wish. Please do not e-mail any files greater than 8 MB. If the overall size is greater, please split it into two or more e-mails. Alternatively, we can give you access to our ftp server - contact us for more information.
About The Old Car Manual Project
Back in early 2000 The Old Car Manual Project was born with a few scanned Holley carburetor manuals. We started with a free website on Geocities. After filling out that webspace (20 MB was a lot back then) we expanded to other free servers. By 2002 the free webspace model was failing - too many ads, too much bad stuff. So we moved to a dedicated server on an ADSL connection - Athlon 1400 using an ADSL connection with 768K upload speed. Very sad by modern standards!
By July 2004 our collection of brochures had grown to the point of deserving its own site, www.oldcarbrochures.com.
We acquired our own dedicated server in 2008. With page views on oldcarbrochures.com approaching 1 million per month in early 2010, we added a second server to help spread the load of our highly graphics-intensive sites. A third server was added in January of 2011.
By November, 2011, monthly page views are over 1.5 million per month.
Today we have over 80 gigabytes of old car stuff - hundreds of thousands of pages - the largest free collection of classic car literature anywhere.
The materials on the site are the product of the hard work of hundreds of Old Car Guys and have been collated and organized by dedicated volunteers.
Old Car Manual Project sites
- www.oldcarmanualproject.com
- The Old Car Manual Project home page.
- www.oldirononline.com
- A text-based index of the materials in the Old Car Manual Project.
- www.oldcarbrochures.com
- Our collection of high-quality scanned car brochures and owner's manuals in a static format. If you wish to link from external sites to brochures, this is the place to do it.
- www.oldcarbrochures.org
- The new home for the brochure collection with a user-friendly interface, actively maintained with regular updates by Fred N.
- chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com
- Run by Keith Hardy, this is the world's largest collection of classic Chevy manuals.
- storm.oldcarmanualproject.com
- Edwin Storm looks after this far-ranging collection of international car brcohures.
- www.oldcaradvertising.com
- This is a collection of over 12,000 vintage car advertisements contributed by Fred N.
- www.oldcarblog.com
- Old car tech info, comments and other ramblings by Rusty.
- www.newagemetal.com
- The Rochester carburetor manual from 1932-1979.
- www.cogpro.com
- Automatic transmission manuals up to the late 60's.
- www.oldcarlibrary.com
- A place where you can upload files in an easy to use gallery format
Rusty Petrovic, the webmaster, looks after the servers and the main indices of the site.
A note from Rusty about the progress of the site:
Back in '98 or '99 a close friend of mine suggested that some of my packrat tendacies could be dealt with in the digital realm: instead of collecting old cars and parts, I could accumulate the digital equivalents.
After mulling this over for a while, and many more discussions of this nature with friends, I made a few, tentative scans of carburetor manuals. Wondering whether it was a big waste of time or not, I uploaded the first iteration of the website. (This is lost as far as I know - it was on geocities and I don't have a copy.)
After a while, I started to receive emails from guys interested in the manuals I was posting and with materials of their own to post. Finally, the idea of posting brochures came up.
And then, it took off like wildfire. While the manuals are the core of the project, adding the brochures broadened the interest in the site to the point where it was too much for one guy to look after. That's where oldcarbrochures.com came from.
Keith Hardy contributed a bunch of Chevy stuff at one point, and also had a website on free servers. Around that time, in the early 00's, the free server model was breaking down. The ads were getting right out of hand. To deal with this, we started the chevy site (chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com) for Keith's ever-growing collection.
About the materials on the site
Most of the items on the site have been scanned and sent in by Old Car Guys, and these are 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.
About copyrights and such
Much of the material on this website is in the public domain and has no copyright attached to it.
Original articles appearing herein are subject to copyright. Please don't copy stuff from this site without asking; it may belong to someone!
Material on this website is presented solely for historical research and educational purposes only.
Any trademarks appearing on this site are the sole property of the registered owners. No endorsement by the trademark owners is to be construed, nor was any sought. The products, brand names, characters, related slogans and indicia are or may be claimed as trademarks of their respective owners. The use of such material falls under the Fair Use provisions of intellectual property laws.
More About the Old Car Manual Project
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 the only ways we have of raising money is by your donations, purchases of our DVD or advertising (which we try to keep as discreet as possible!)
Please consider how much you might pay for some of this material if it wasn't available here for free.