The Classic Machinery Network

I thought some of the members may be interested to hear about a project I am currently working on with my collection of brochures.

My collection of earth moving spec sheets and brochures has grown to several thousand items with the majority of them being Backhoe Loaders which is my main interest. Steelfab and Whitlock literature and amoungst my favourites as well as a great passion for JCB which is particularly helpful as I am the Product Manager for JCB.

In my spare time I have been organising my collection of JCB literature which has taken me a long time due to the size of the task and still far from complete, but I have now got all my Backhoe Loader spec sheets into date order. What I was considering is publishing a vintage section on the JCB.com website of all the old spec sheets and be grateful on members thoughts on this? Would it be of interest to collectors and owners of old machines?

Is anyone aware of anyone who also has a large collection of old JCB brochures who could be a source if we are missing a particular spec sheet?

I have also tracked down the original hand written sales ledgers going back to the early 1960's which list the details of every machine sold with the serial number, dealer to whom it was sold, date, engine number and in some cases the price! The information is all in paper format and are considering converting into a digital file to search for information for example if a customer wanted to know the information on an old machine we could easily find it.

I would be intersted to know what think of this idea or any other suggestions ?

regards Julian

Hi Julian, Seems you have a mammoth task there, i for one, would welcome it, its a wonder that no one has thought of it before, and i am sure that you will get help and support from CMN members

Martyn

Sounds a great idea to me Julian, don't fancy putting your Steelfab and Whitlock brochures up as well do you

Hi Julian,

great idea!
On Maskinisten we have a guy (Jimmi) collecting brochures. I will direct him to this thread.
We have put up almost all his material at Maskinisten.
Also, we have all the old Åkerman-material posted there.

Just one thing: be sure to have a good backup-system! Jimmi had a harddisk-failure some days ago, and also this servers TWO harddisks had to be switched last week. We had very much luck that they had the failure with some days inbetween.
But we also have several backupsystems for the data and the database. Not only the RAID on the server.

Hi Julian,go for it!Anything archive JCB has to be worthwhile and interesting.Await update.

Hey

Ive got a fair few old jcb brochures on the backhoes if you need any help give us a shout!

Pat

Hi Pat,

what age are your brochures? Do you have any duplicates?

Hello my old chum Julian - hope you're well - As you know I've a fair few JCB items which your welcome to borrow anytime. Keep in touch!

i think it would be a fantastic idea. it would be a good way of showing jcb heritage to would be purchasers. great way to build the company profile in the eyes of those viewing by way of showing the years of tech development and time built experience. go for it. you could even have a link for jcb only forum and put cmn in links of course

Hi all, I have just about completed my database of all the backhoe brochures produced by JCB. I am missing a number of the very eary brochures in my collection form the 1950 and 1960's but have farily good coverage from then on and know the ones I am missing. If anyone would be willing to part with any early brochures or swap them for others they are looking for please let me know.

I have also organised all my other JCB brochures by product group although do not have them catalogued electronically like the BHL's as its too much work. It has taken many weeks to get the BHL's completed!

Although my collection is not complete, we do have a complete set in the JCB archives and are planning to get all of these scanned into PDF and possibly create a historic page on the JCB website but we'll see how we get on.

Also, I am in the process of creating a new Poster of all the BHL produced through the ages so those who are interested watch this space... We did do one back in the early 1990's when the old images were hand painted for the purpose of producing the poster but unfortunately the original artwork is missing persumed thrown. If anyone does know the whereabouts of these pictures it would be helpful to get them scanned in again for this poster. Just let me know.