Owner’s Manuals

There’s a meme going ’round suggesting that 50 years ago automobile owner’s manuals told you how to adjust valves while today they tell you not to drink the battery acid. Funny, and it’s one way to point out that instructions today are more a collection of cover-your-ass legal messages than actual instructions. My personal favourite is the “Do not use in the shower” notice on electric hair dryers. Well, soon hair dryers will all be battery operated and shower-safe and we can all answer the important question: “Can my hair dryer dry my hair faster than the shower can wet it?”

Anyhow, just to set the record straight, if you wanted any kind of technical information about an American car beyond regular replacement items and quantities thereof, you would have to spring for the maintenance manuals. I bought mine – all four volumes of about 200 pages each. For a 1972 Thunderbird, they cost about 1/10th of 1% of the price of the car. So $15 or so for my $14K list price car. Since the car is gone and the manuals in storage, if I still have them, I will not be posting them here.

To show what was in the owner’s manual though, here is mine.

Thunderbird-1972

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