how to save damp paper repair manual pages ?
 

I recently purchased a John Deere diesel garden tractor and a service manual came with it. About an inch thick so lots of pages. 95 % of the pages are in good shape but the remaining at the end of the manual look like they got wet. At the very least damp from being in a outdoor shed or worse may have actually gotten wet. So today I took a pair of scissors and trimmed off as much of the ruined pages and that went OK. I did lose some text but not much. I currently have the manual in our sunroom which is air conditioned. If I leave it out there for a week or two will the AC pull the dampness out of the pages ? Or should I set it in the sun ? Put in a ziploc bag with rice ? This manual is aprox. 125.00 + so I want to save it. I was also thinking about taking the pages out of the book/spine and placing each page in a plastic sleeve then in a 3 ring binder. So any paper page saving experts out there ? :D

No vacuum pump and bell jar? :cool:

EDIT: back in the 70's there was a fire at the National Public Records facility in St Louis and McDonnell Douglas volunteered the use of the vacuum chambers that they trained the Mercury astronauts in to dry out the water soaked records.

I'd think that letting it slowly dry in the AC room would keep it from getting brittle.

I'd ditch the bag and rice and leave it in a room with lots of AC and air circulation.

If you want to accelerate things, get a dehumidifier for the room, and a fan or ceiling fan for circulation, maybe a room that you can close the door to so the humidity in the room is lower than the rest of the house. But none of that is probably necessary unless your area is really humid.

You'd be suprised at what you can find online as a pdf file... what model tractor exactly?

I don't know if this will have your exact manual, but here are a bunch of garden tractor manuals:
Yanmar - GTtalk

Manuals - GTtalk

Do you have or can you borrow a dehydrator? It will work great.

John Deere 330 garden tractor with 3 cylinder diesel .

TM1591 mean anything? http://www.wfmfiles.com/download/manuals/TM1591.pdf

id10t you are DA MAN !!! Thank you

The pages are drying nicely just being in the AC. For what I need they should be fine and if not I'll print some off from the PDF file.

If they are wet put them in a freezer. They will freeze but eventually they will dry out.

Once I rescued some old pages that were stuck together by soaking them again.