Merry Christmas! Documentation Is Ready

[Steve83]

Gary Lewis wrote

Also, I added the TSB for the hydraulic clutch/firewall cracking issue...

Have you browsed/raided this site?
http://www.bbbind.com/free_tsb.html
You don't have to use a real e-mail to get access.

[Gary Lewis]

I haven't because the T's & C's say you can't create any publications, let others use it, etc.  So I've limited my TSB's to what I can find that doesn't have those limitations.  

[Steve83]

Ford has released its TSBs many times in many formats.  For several years (not currently) many of them were available online at the Ford site as footnotes for parts, fluids, & chemicals.  They've also been released on disks & paper for dealerships, and those formats are all over eBay/CL/etc.  So that site's Ts&Cs can't apply to the TSBs themselves (which Ford owns and had released long before that site got them) - only to the site itself, that the site owners own.  Most of the TSBs in my collection came from the disks I got while I worked at the dealership, but some came from books I bought on eBay, and a few came from other sites similar to that one.
https://www.supermotors.net/registry/2742/21196-4

[Gary Lewis]

Good point.  But, since I like to convert what I post to searchable pdf, it would help a lot if they came that way initially.  So, I'll look for them on a CD and hope that they are true documents and not pictures of documents.  But, if you see one before I do, please point it out to me.

Thanks!

[Steve83]

If you have OCR software, you can run it on those images - just save them to your HDD.  There are also online OCR services (some free) that will convert online images, or those you save to your HDD and upload to the service.

I had planned to scan & OCR several of the books I bought, but my good scanner only worked in XP, which I lost several years ago.  I just got a new scanner that might do it, but I haven't played with it much yet (too much time posting to BBSs ).

[Gary Lewis]

I have Foxit, which has OCR capabilities.  In fact, I've OCR'd the whole of the ~6,000 page 1980 - 89 master parts catalog, which makes it far, far easier to find things.

However, that took an unreal amount of time, not only while the computer did its thing but also for me having to proof what it questioned - and it questioned things on every page.  Plus I've run into problems where the OCR software crashes my computer, which means you get to start over.  So, I'd rather find something that might already be a text document to save all the agro.

I've done a bit of searching and haven't, yet, found a CD of the TSB's.  I did find a printed copy of some of them, but don't want printed as then I do have to scan them, and that takes way too much time.  I've quit scanning things myself and have instead hired the ladies at our local shipping/printing depot to do that for me.  In fact, I took 8 brochures out to them yesterday to have them scan them so I can put them on the site.

So, if you see a CD for sale of the TSB's please let me know.  If the cost is reasonable I'll gamble that they are text doc's, but at least they'll be easy to put on the site.

[Steve83]

I gather from that post that you're NOT going to do this , but I'm going to explain just for anyone else who might be curious...

The process I use on images I find (better than just OCRing a low-res image) is to enhance the image in XNView (free) by increasing the resolution (SHIFT+S) by a non-integer factor (like 3.2x, or 100dpi to 427dpi, etc.) with the "resample" & "sharpen" boxes checked.  The resample algorithm doesn't seem to make much difference - I typically use Lanczos, but the others work about as well.  Then I adjust contrast (usually to the max) & brightness (usually darker) to make the letters more legible, with fewer speckles.  If the text is severely tilted, XNView is very good at rotating, but most OCRs can auto-align small angles.

I find that OCR software behaves MUCH better when the smallest letters are more than 10 pixels tall (though 100 pixels is overkill).  So when scanning a hard copy, check the first pass to make sure the scan resolution is high enough.

If there are dark areas (from bound pages being off the scanner) or images mixed into the text, I sometimes delete those in MSPaint after XNView and before OCRing.  Paint is also good for saving a color image as a 16-color or monochrome bitmap, which is easier & quicker for the OCR to read.  But don't use MSPaint's "image properties" to change a color image to B&W - all colors other than perfect white become black, and it can't be undone (you have to close the image WITHOUT saving, and re-open it).

I have an old TSB disk around here somewhere, but I haven't installed it since maybe Win2K, so I don't even know if I could open it on this Win7 system.  IIRC, it was true text with embedded B&W .BMPs.

[Gary Lewis]

I've used a few of those tricks.  However, since most of my OCR'ing is of documents I either have on CD or have scanned, the resolution is plenty high enough for my software.  So I don't have to play those games very often.  And, when I do it is with Photoshop.

But it has only been recently that I've realized that making a document searchable is a boon to being found via a Google search.  I've put terms in the SEO section of Weebly for each page, but it is very tedious to do so.  However, if the document is searchable Google will crawl & index it so that people can find it.

And that might explain part of the significant growth we are seeing of people clicking on the Garagemahal entry when they search for things.  As you can see from this chart showing Google clicks for the last year, around August 1st it started climbing from the roughly 60 clicks/day it had been running at for several months to about 120/day currently.




And, while we are at it, here are the "unique visitors" to the site for the same period.  The large spikes are from things like when the site was promoted by Keith Dickson on FORDification, when Craig Hessman promoted it on FaceBook, when I've announced new pages on FB, etc.  But ignoring those, we've grown from about 140 unique visitors each day to something around 300.

And all of this might explain why we seem to be having a larger number of people join the forum each week.  I don't have stat's for that, but of late there have been quite a few.  

[Gary Lewis]

Today I scanned in the odometer reset instructions David brought me, OCR'd them, and then replaced the previous ones on this page: Electrical/Gauges.  Thanks, David!  

And, while I was doing that there arose a discussion on FB about the printed circuits on the gauge clusters.  So, I added this to the part numbers on that page.  Note that there are two year ranges (1980 and 1981/86), and within the ranges there are circuits for clusters with warning lights, clusters with gauges but w/o a tach, and clusters with gauges with a tach.  And, of course, if you are trying to ID one of those you want to look at the #'s in the Description column, not the part number column as the number on the part is not the part number.

[1986F150Six]

Regarding the odometer resetting instructions, you are welcome!

[Gary Lewis]

Evening.  Over the last couple of days I've done a bit of work on the website adding 8 new brochures.  As you'll see on another post I need input on what I've done, but let's just document here what those 8 brochures are:

1983 Ford Chassis-Cab

1984 Bronco

1984 Ford Trucks

1985 Explorer Program

1985 Bronco

1985 Ford Trucks

1986 Trailer Towing Guide

1986 Ford Trucks

[Gary Lewis]

I added the information from the 1986 Ford Full Spectrum Recreation Vehicle & Trailer-Towing Guide that is specific to trailer towing using the F-Series and Broncos to the Towing page in Specifications.  It is, in my opinion, easier to read and more complete than that in the owner's manuals.

[Gary Lewis]

While there was already a page on here for wiring diagrams, aka schematics, the page was pretty useless as you couldn't really read them.  I've changed the way the schematics are on there and now I believe you can easily zoom in far enough to read and use the schematics.  (Unless you are on a phone, and then that would probably be an effort in futility.)

So, please take a peek and let me know what you think: Electrical/Wiring Diagrams.  Does this approach work?  Should I continue in this fashion?

[Gary Lewis]

I added a page for the index of TSB's I just got today: TSB's/TSB Index.  But, just one webpage gives you access to 42 physical pages.  I wonder how many physical pages the 445 webpages give in total?

[1986F150Six]

~18690?

[Gary Lewis]

LOL!  Yes, if each webpage had 42 physical pages.  But some don't really have any, and some have over 100.  I really don't have any idea how many physical pages there are.  However, in the last two or three days we've added about 150 of them.  

[Gary Lewis]

Today I finished the 1985 EVTM and added it to the website in two ways:

The old way, with an index page (Electrical/EVTM/1985 EVTM) and 36 subsequent pages that are accessed via the index.  All in all, those pages hold 157 pages, including the Index, and represents a whole lot of work.

As a pdf, as described in this post.  This way is less work in many ways, so I'm interested in using it in future.  Please go read that post and let me know what you think in that thread.

[Gary Lewis]

A gentleman on a Facebook page was selling a Type 2 wheel cover that he said was for an '85.  So I added a page on Driveline/Wheel Covers to show that it is a D6TZ 1130-A and was used through the whole of the Bullnose era.  But, it started in '76 and went through '89, so who knows how long it was used?

[Gary Lewis]

Today I upgraded the page on Driveline/Transfer Cases to include the exploded view/illustration and parts list for the NP208.  Now we have the illustration, parts list, and repair procedure for that t-case in one place.  

[Gary Lewis]

Based on the way the NP208 tab turned out, I upgraded the BW1345 tab on the Driveline/Transfer Cases page.  It now includes the illustration and parts list from the master parts catalog and both Ford's rebuild/repair instructions from the factory shop manual as well as Borg-Warner's service manual.