[ThingyNess]

Has anyone thought of perhaps pooling together and splitting the cost of getting an Alldata membership for the various escorts, saving all the technical service bulletins, and posting them to a website?

There has to be enough of us here that want them to make sharing them relatively easy. I'm considering doing that for my '92 EGT to make my life easier when troubleshooting it.

Alternatively, anyone work at a dealer with a subscription and could possibly get them for us for free?

I'm also considering purchasing one of the ford factory repair manual cds from ebay and making an iso image of it and posting it on the web for all to have. Does anyone have one that they've bought? If they can make me an image and send it to me, I'll host it. Alternatively they could mail me a copy if they were nice.

Any thoughts?

With all of our resources here @ feoa, this information should be accessible to all of us with a little work.

 

[Spider-Man]

I don't know what you are talking about. Help those of us who are new to the "scene" out. Thanks.

 

[ThingyNess]

Sorry.

http://www.alldata.com/recalls/

Put in your car's year and model - they have all the technical service bulletins from the factory about the most common problems - without paying, they only give you the titles. If you pay, you get the full articles, with info on how to fix /diagnose / troubleshoot the problems.

All this info would be of great help for all of us backyard mechanics trying to fix our cars.

The cd on ebay I was talking about is one of these:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayI ... 2424457829

If any of us happens to have bought one and can post the image or give a copy to someone who can post the image, we can then get all the benefits from it without having to all pay for one.

 

[Beaverboy]

And what do you propose to do about copyright infringement?

 

[ThingyNess]

As far as I know, the TSB information isn't copyrighted at all by alldata, nor is it even the property of alldata. The formatting and the alldata logo is, but the TSB info is the property of ford, and as far as I know, they give it out freely if asked - but you have to push your local dealer a lot to give you the TSBs.

I can post the TSBs in plaintext format, with all the html formatting from alldata.com stripped.

As far as the cd goes, that's a little dicier, but Ford is pretty much charging only for the distribution of the cds from the prices being charged on ebay. If they can sell the cd for $4.99, the motive for allowing them to be in the channel by Ford is information availability, not profit.

By the letter of the law, you're absolutely right - distributing the cd images will likely be violating copyright law, but I doubt ford would particularly mind. This is just a more efficient method of distribution of that data that doesn't cost people money.

If a Ford lawyer were to be upset about the posting of the TSBs or the manual, then i'd be happy to take them down from the public internet and just send the relevant info to anyone who wanted.

 

[93EGTinLR]

well....if you're that interested I have a set of the ALLDATA cd's that I was trying to sell...the set I have is for 1st quarter 2002...I have seen on Ebay where you can get a software key to make it work...haven't bothered myself yet...let me know if you are interested though...they are still for sale and are complete with install disc