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Eric, I like to think of you as more of our resident Mad Scientist!

I would take that title with honor!

While I've got $0.02 and plenty more to put in on this, I can't seem to get a break at work lately, but will take advantage of what promises to be a rainy holiday weekend to catch up.

So, I'll leave this post to hold my place in line, and come back first chance I get.

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I guess it's time to post my pic on here, taken directly from "Eric's Experimental Packard Laboratory"

Eric,

Thanks for the self-photo.

Is that a fuel additive you are mixing up there in your Pack Lab?

DanL

That is a Top-Secret additive that will reduce friction by 500% as compared to regular oil. I can say no more.....

BigKev wrote:

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Well, I've been collecting literature for my cars, privately, for over 30 years (and not just Packards), but I won't bore you with the details of what it took to come up with all the issues of the Service Counselor (SC) and Service Technical Bulletin (STB). Yet, as familiar as I am, generally, with the scope of the factory service manual, I have to admit that looking for information in all those publications is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

When I finally set my sights on making single reference to them all, I actually had a bit of a leg up because Packard had published an annual index for each year and each of those publications - except for the truncated 1956 calendar year. Since I had already started mocking up original-style indices for SCs and STBs for that short year, I just merged the text together with the factory indices for 1955. While I'd also found some good info for my Packards in the Studebaker Service Bulletin (SSB) series following 1956, I had no way to know if I had them all, let alone index them - until a few years ago, when I found some good help through noted Studebaker historian and literature collector, Richard Quinn. It was then that I knew I could offer something truly all-inclusive that no one else had done.

About the time I began compiling "A Comprehensive Index to to Service Bulletins for 55th-56th Series Packards", a new club emerged that I thought would fill a technical void that had been ignored by another Packard club. So, I donated an HTML verison of the work exclusively to "The Packard V8 Club". Although there was some talk about linking the index entries to actual article/bulletin content, I already had plenty other work to do. Eventually, I lost interest in that club and deleted my MSN account, but did not ask for the Index to be removed.

However, I've seen little development with that club's website since then. So, I suppose its time to open the door to something a bit more dynamic. However, note that while the STBs were scanned and made available here individually, the SCs and SSBs seem to be lumped together in "volumes", which could pose some problem for the end-user. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether it's worth going back and breaking those down into individual issues.

If this works, perhaps we can OCR the indices for earlier, related Series and attempt same for them. If you're missing those indices, I'll check to see if I have any here before we try to do this the hard way. I can also provide info on any applicable Stude bulletins, though they are much fewer in number as you look back to earlier Series.

I dont have a problem with breaking the SC's into individual volumes. I think we have almost all of them (give or take) from 1947-1956.

So if we can come up with a game plan, and we have some volunteers to help compile the indexes, then I will take care of splitting all the volumes up and adding all the links to the compiled indexes.

Remember folks, this is a community effort where we can all benefit, so the more help we can get with this, the better (and quicker) it will all come together.

Thanks!

The more I think about it, my use of the word "merge" might have been a poor choice for compiling that index.

You see, the indices for the three different publications (SCs, STBs, and SSBs) didn't share the same exact topic headings. So, what I chose to do was re-index all the topics using the Section labels from the factory shop manual. However, I also made some subtopic heading for things like push-button control, Torsion-Level, etc.

That way, the shop manual would be the FIRST stop for service information. THEN, if someone doesn't find what they're looking for or want to check for updates, they go to the same section in the bulletin index and use a table of contents that's hyperlinked to the major topic headings. THEN, if they still don't find what they're looking for, they can ask an informed question in the appropriate Forum or do site search.

So, while we can save some typing by scanning any available factory indices, someone still needs to condense and categorize the topics (and adding any applicable listings from Stude bulletins).

As such, it may help people get a better feel for what is needed if we get something up and running with the 1955-56 index that is already written. Perhaps then, the 1951-54 index would be the next logical step, and we could backwards in time from that point.

Meanwhile, let us know what factory indices you already have for each year of Service Counselor and Service Technical Bulletin, and we can check to see if we can fill in any voids.