Gang,
Adjunct to the car fun, here & there I get tired of the garage & sit down at the computer. Occasionally my 2 worlds collide, like they did last week.

Background
I came across a partial binder of 1966 Oldsmobile Dealer Bulletins in Dayton 2023. It's more complete than the binder I had, but the page gaps tell me there's more to the story than what I physically have. This book answered some questions I've had for 40 years like the qjet carb side inlet safety questions and scratches in my front door windows. It turns out both issues were known to the factory and they had solutions, er, well, fixes...

Digitizing
I scanned 320 pages or so of Technical Information Bulletins which represent how the Olds communicated with the Dealers about changes, fixes, product improvements & so on. My binder was separated into sections by system: Engines, Chassis, Body, Transmission, etc...

Slightly world weary but this book goes beyond the Chassis Service Manual, Fisher Body Manual, + Parts Accessories Catalogs.

I thought it would help you all as much as me to see how the factory & dealers worked on new products and fixes required in the field.

Here's some pricing data that my binder had upfront:

I haven't calculated the margins, but I'm guessing the dealers weren't losing money... I have a full price list in this binder too - both jpeg & as an Excel spreadsheet to let me figure out dealer margins.

Not to nerd out, but I wound up with 735mb of jpegs, and CO can only accept 20mb at at time. So I wanted to do a test upload to see if this is interesting to you all & worth the space it will take up. Let me know.

Cleaning Up
Along the way I got disappointed with the quality of my source data. On the original pages there was all kinds of dirt, staples, crinkles, & typos. It was so bad that I remade the colored paper pages in Photoshop to have good templates to drop the factory verbiage into. That turned out to be really helpful. I'm happy with the clean templates. But I was very careful to keep the factory words & photos. I hope you are too. I even discovered a few typos. I corrected them, hopefully in a way that is faithful to the source material, but correct.

Output: worth the effort?
A typical section of the Service Bulletin Binder is attached.

When you have a moment, please take a quick look and let me know if it's worth uploading the rest of this stuff. It's interesting to me to have diagrams of how our cars go together, but I'm not sure if anyone else cares at all.

Lots to contribute if anyone wants it. I have 600 DPI jpegs of every page and high res PDFs if anyone cares. I'm guessing that down the road they might be helpful in diagnosing someone else's car problems, or maybe helping them fix something that is (or ain't) broke...

I've learned so much here, trying to give back in some small way. Many thanks to all who have helped me.

Cheers
Chris

 

Looks great! I can see them and download no problem. Thanks for this, these will be very helpful and thank you for the hard work! Keep em coming!

I'm particularly interested as I think the 66' CSM for the Toronado has quite a few items that would likely be dealt with in various TSB's released throughout the year. Also, I've become quite a information geek on these things and am interested in anything 1966' Olds!

 

Chris, there could be a way to share the whole batch, as they have done with parts manuals. Charlie Jones could help point you in the right direction.

 

Chris, that is a huge amount of effort you put into this! Though I don't have a '66, I'm sure those with them will appreciate your "nerding out!"