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  #16  
Old 06-12-2002, 02:43 AM
Senior Canadian Member
 
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Location: British Columbia, Canada
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Wink

Quote:
Originally posted by hbofinger
your dad could probably put a Benz together from scratch!
Naaah..that's my job. he takes them apart and gets me to fix 'em.

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'94 W124.036 249/040 leder; 8.25x17 EvoIIs
'93 W124.036 199/040 leder; 8.25x17 EvoIIs, up in flames...LITERALLY!
'93 W124.036 481/040 leder; euro delivery; 8.25x17 EvoIIs
'88 R107.048 441/409 leder; Euro lights
'87 W201.034 199/040 leder; Euro lights; EvoII brakes; 8x16 EvoIs - soon: 500E rear brakes
'70 R113.044 050/526; factory alloys; Euro lights
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  #17  
Old 06-12-2002, 03:12 AM
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What is the cheapest way to get manuals for the 300e? Why doesn't someone post the PDF files on the net for everyone to get access to?
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  #18  
Old 06-12-2002, 03:40 AM
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Quote:
Originally posted by conversekidz
What is the cheapest way to get manuals for the 300e? Why doesn't someone post the PDF files on the net for everyone to get access to?
not sure if they apply, but copyright laws may have something to do with it?
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'94 W124.036 249/040 leder; 8.25x17 EvoIIs
'93 W124.036 199/040 leder; 8.25x17 EvoIIs, up in flames...LITERALLY!
'93 W124.036 481/040 leder; euro delivery; 8.25x17 EvoIIs
'88 R107.048 441/409 leder; Euro lights
'87 W201.034 199/040 leder; Euro lights; EvoII brakes; 8x16 EvoIs - soon: 500E rear brakes
'70 R113.044 050/526; factory alloys; Euro lights
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  #19  
Old 06-12-2002, 09:58 AM
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mb manuals

I thought about a cd manual but after reading posts like these, Ikept searching on e-bay and finally won an auction. I am getting the factory engine manual and chassis manuals 1 & 2 for about $100. Consensus semms to to be for the paper manuals. I'll let you know of thier usefullness.
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  #20  
Old 06-13-2002, 11:05 AM
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I can't resist chiming in here.
The CDs suck.
What is the point of digital media that is not searchable?
They could have easily thrown us a bone and built an index.
I takes forever to find anything. You have to guess which category your topic is under, then you go down 10 pages, only to find that your topic is down some other branch in the 'tree'.
If I have to wait for that stupid AVI movie to load one more time, I will scream!
I have even played with the idea of building my own index to the individual PDF files, but hesitate to invest the time. I do save direct links to files I want to revisit, which helps.
I have to conceed that they are better than nothing, but certainly do detract from my 'ownership experience'.
The reason for producing a CD that is essentially pictures of a paper manual is that the margins are really good. It costs only a couple of dollars to produce a CD they can sell for $150. Paper manuals are much more expensive to produce and ship.

Too bad they did not farm the job out to Bentley. They produce first-rate paper manuals for VW/Audi and some BMWs. Their prices are reasonable considering the suberb quality.

Now that I got that off my chest, it should be noted that people on Ebay frequently sell bootleg copies on the cheap. Also, I will not rat them out, but some folks have helpfully posted the entire contents of several of the CDs on their websites. The CDs somehow look a whole lot better when they are free!
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  #21  
Old 06-13-2002, 11:13 AM
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These are the worst CD's I have ever used.Any other cd I open does so automaticly and is easy to search and use.This over one hundred dollar thing to the ones of us that are not very computer literate,Is junk.
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  #22  
Old 06-13-2002, 11:26 PM
realneal
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Making the MB CDs searchable

Like a few other members on this board, my primary day job is programming and other computer-related things. I recently bought the CD set from eBay and was interested to see just how badly the CDs were organized. Actually, they are organized OK--for a MB dealer shop, or someone who uses them daily, that is.

I have begun building a system to greatly improve access to the information on the CDs. It will take a lot of repetitive, manual cut and paste operations and a fair amount of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processing, but I have a great application package planned that will hopefully give a new lease on life for all that information that is tied to those inflexible HTML menus.

What is needed is a means for a casual user (a weekend tinkerer) to be able to see the menu titles of each file on the CDs and to find every occurrance of a given word or phrase, and then with a few clicks, be able to browse through the relevant pages and study or print the information found.

I spent last Saturday finding out just how much grunt labor will be necessary. Ten hours just to identify which menu titles are associated to which files within one of the larger folders.

The results were very telling--I found a few (and even one is too many) files that were not referenced and a few more that possibly referenced the wrong pages.

I manually built four hundred eighteen files for the CD1 Chassis folder alone. Just one of those files, titled the 'Functional Description of Airbags' or something similar, contained thirty-one pages of text and diagrams. There is a lot of information that will be made accessible via browsing or searching once I have finished the huge amount of grunt work and the programming to tie it all together.

I have hopes that the results will make a lot of MB owners happy and will make me a few bucks for my efforts to boot. The members of this forum can be my first (and possibly my only)critics when it is completed.
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  #23  
Old 06-14-2002, 12:21 AM
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Angry I feel your pain...

I bought the W124 and W126 CD's at an eBay auction. I paid only $20.00 apiece, so I guess I am not out a lot of cash.

I agree with everyone here: (1) the lack of a search engine; (2) the fact that one has to go back to the opening menu each time there is a new search; PLUS (3) the silly opening movie, all make the CDs almost unuseable...

Does anyone here know where radiator issues, especially radiator R&R, are located on the W124 CD?

I'd greatly appreciate a pointer in the right direction
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Last edited by BENZ-LGB; 06-14-2002 at 02:17 PM.
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  #24  
Old 06-14-2002, 12:46 PM
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If you build it, they will come...

RealNeal,
I went down the same path, and decided I am far too unambitious to expend that sort of effort. I would certainly be a very happy 'consumer' of your Index if you decide to build it.

Even a simpler 'Master Index' than you describe with just the main heading for each PDF file would add substantial value over the current design. Of course, sucking in all of those 'subheadings' would be even better...

3 cheers for realneal!
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  #25  
Old 06-14-2002, 04:09 PM
realneal
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BENZ-LGB
Sorry, but if there is a reference to the radiator itself, it is in one of the PDF files which are graphics-based.

You may have to wait till I OCR them, but even if I get started this weekend, I do not know how long it will take to do them, since there are literally thousands to do.

OCR is a relatively slow process, since the software has to recognize a 'picture' of a given graphic character, then decide what character the 'picture' represents.

After all the characters in a file have been 'recognized', the system does a 'spell-check' to detect the presence of a 'invalid' character that would cause the word to be 'misspelled', like interpreting the character 'K' as an 'l' and a '<', causing 'Kitchen' to be spelled as 'l
Each time an invalid character is detected, the software has to stop for a human's intervention.

I'll see what I can do this weekend.

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