Having dis- and reassembled a Rapide this summer, I often had to spend more time searching for an information than reading and using it.
An expression I learned many years ago is "half of knowledge is knowing where to find it." My original post in this thread mentioned my concern that, while a thread already may exist on the VOC Forum doing exactly what I asked about, the search engine made it impossible, not just to find it if it
does exist, but even to determine if it
doesn't exist. I consider that to be a major downside to posting my rebuild here. However, as someone suggested, this easily might be solved if Graham added a "Major Projects" section (as opposed to minor projects, like rebuilding a head, adjusting a clutch, relining brakes, etc.).
If all else fails, publish a book.
Anything you write here you can also quickly copy/paste to a Word doc you can then PDF and post in installments, or as a set.
Having had experience with web sites crashing, or the internet connection dropping and losing what I had written before I could hit 'send', for years I've done it the opposite way. I write and edit on Word and then upload the final content when I'm happy with it.
Simple solution send the text and pictures to MPH on the understanding that each months instalment is placed in the archives
As an indication of the scope of what I'm discussing, the thread about rebuilding the 1928 Ariel mentioned in my first post is a Word document that is 278 single-spaced pages long in 10 point font with only small thumbnails of the embedded photographs. The folder containing images (most of which aren't in that thread because of the site's 5 images/post limit) has 1972 photographs.
consider if you were to be writing a text book on your speciality. I have done this and know that it pays to check and recheck sources and facts. If this is to be your first Vincent rebuild then no matter what your intellect there will be people. Greg is an example, who have more experience in the practicalities of the process than most other individuals. You also need to access more than one source.
My graduate students and postdocs working on a given project were, almost by definition, truly the world's experts on whatever the topic was of a given manuscript. But, the final published result always benefited by having been critically read by the others in my group who were working on related projects. That's why the idea of a blog, which because of internet realities would have to be locked to outside comments, isn't reasonable.
As an aside, I've had a
lot of experience with writing, having books and manuscripts published, maintaining web pages, and posting motorcycle restoration threads. Despite that experience, the question I posted at the start of this thread has resulted in a number of valuable suggestions. Which is exactly why I posted that question. If I didn't expect there to be a number of excellent suggestions to the content of my Vincent restoration thread that influenced how I proceeded with it, I certainly wouldn't take the time to write it.
As for access to more than one source, immediately after buying the Vincent I compiled a bespoke shop manual consisting of tabbed sections with every piece of technical information I could find in my collection of books and magazines.
The tabbed sections in the four binders of that manual roughly correspond to chapters and sub-chapters in Richardson and KNB.
As I've done with similar manuals I made for other bikes I restored, I don't try to edit material before adding it, so each tabbed section contains a mix of correct, incorrect, redundant, and obsolete information, as well as alternative approaches to achieve the same end result. I mentally edit the material in real time as I work on whatever is covered by a particular section.
Whenever new information has appeared since I first set up that manual, I added it, causing it to swell to its current size. For example, some years ago I acquired a fairly complete set of 'MPH' dating back to the first issue in 1949 which, in addition to having articles with technical information that I added to the manual, also had articles describing useful special tools, all of which I then made. Also, I should mention '40 Years On' and 'Another Ten Years'.
When it comes to longevity of the final product;..
I should say I am interested in "reasonable," not perpetual longevity. The problem is that web sites come and go so even seemingly-robust ones have disappeared overnight. Even where a web site hasn't disappeared, often software upgrades have caused information to effectively become unavailable. A few years ago Photobucket abruptly changed its policy on hosting images, with devastating impact on a number of other sites that relied on it. Interestingly, nearly 600 years after Guttenberg, paper copies produced in multiple copies still are the gold standard of 'permanent'.
a Haynes Manual-like step by step documentation with a lot of high quality pictures would have saved me a lot of time.
Don't set your hopes too high. While, ideally, my restoration would proceed in a step-by-step sequence like, say, the chapters in Richardson or KNB, somehow that's never been quite the case for any of my previous restorations. The 278 pages of my Ariel restoration contain everything needed to be, by far, the most complete restoration manual for a 1928 Ariel, but to reorganize the contents into a step-by-step manual would require a
lot of time.
As you well know the list of tools and equipment required to do a proper restoration is lengthy. ...
Personally I think those sorts of discussions must be included in the thread
That's an important point. Given the considerable effort creating such a restoration thread represents, part of the implicit (or explicit) "contract" with wherever I post it is that my judgment of what constitutes reasonable content has to prevail. As an example, although I barely mentioned the word "motorcycle" in the following post, I consider its content to be reasonable.
Restoration Decisions Before I had decided on an as-originally-built approach to restoring this BSA, I acquired some parts that I now don't plan to use on this machine. Specifically, I prefer the look of the alloy scrambler tank and the shorter "racing dualseat," both ...
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