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Large Appendix Sheets

My wife and I drove to Alabama in late 2004 and we picked up the first kit that I purchased from eBay.  Along with that kit came a full set of Q-2 plans including an uncut set of all the Appendix Sheets.  Over the past few days I've been working on reformatting and printing the original Appendix Sheets for the Q-2, so that others in the quickie community might be able to use them as well. 

The original owner of the Appendix Sheets had folded them all up so that they were able to fit in a large envelope with the plans.  When I got them, I immediately unfolded them and laid them out flat.  I then pressed them between two very large pieces of cardboard and I kept them stored that way for the nexy couple of years, as my wife and I moved to our new house and completed some renovations. 

When I finally got back around to looking at them, it was apparent that although they were in pretty good shape, they were beggining to deteriorate due to age.  Paper that is over 20 years old tends to get a little brittle, and these appendix sheets were no exception.  They had already turned yellow, and it was becoming all too easy to tear the edges whenever I tried to move them.  So I began thinking about scanning them for archive, in the hopes that not only myself, but others could get some use out of them.

Well a couple of years ago, Larry Severenson made a post on the Yahoo Q-list requesting the large templates.  He apparently wanted to digitize them and make them available to others.  I thought this sounded like a great idea, so I rolled up the originals and sent them off to Larry.  A couple of weeks passed, and I eventually got the original prints shipped back to me, but I never received the digital copies, and never got an explanation of what happened.  Hmm?

The next time I thought about them was the "Grand Opening" of the FedEx Kinko's in our neck of the woods.  I went over to the shop to have some business documents printed, and while I was there I noticed that they had some large format scanners.  I ran home, grabbed the huge peices of cardboard with the Appendix Sheets snadwiched in between, and drove back to FedEx Kinko's ready to do some archiving.

Unfortunately, the original Appendix Sheets are 38" wide by about 52" long, and wouldn't you know, the large format scanners at Kinko's only accepted 36" wide documents.  Damn!  I was so excited about the opportunity to archive these original documents and make them available to everyone, that I seriously considered cutting them in half and then putting them back together in the digital world.  I eventually came to my senses, it would be such a shame to cut something that had made it 20 years or so without being touched.  So I waited.

Fast Forward to May 2008, I got my first post in the forums here on this site.  Mike Quinn (who is building a Q2) contacted me to see if I had access to the Appendix Sheets.  I told him that I had the sheets, but that I didn't have a way to scan them.  His situation was the opposite, he had access to a very large format scanner, but didn't have access to the sheets.  To make a long story short, we traded, and in a few days Mike had scanned the Appendix Sheets and uploaded them to an FTP site that I set up for him.  Shortly thereafter, I recieved the original prints back in the mail.

Now, my idea is to print out a set of the digitized Appendix Sheets and see if they match up.  Of course, I soon realized that most of the print shops around here are limited to 36" wide again, so I'm back to the drawing board. (So to speak.)  Over the next few weeks I intend to reformat the original prints so that they are no wider than 36", have them printed using a "Print on Demand" service over the internet and report my results back here on this site.

If all goes well, I will make the Appendix Sheets available for download.

Wish me luck!   Wink