Recipe for scanning factory wiring diagrams

[charlesbahn]

Hi- I've been working on scanning the factory manuals and have found the following recipe for scanning the electrical diagrams. The original color plates are works of art and this is a good method of reproducing them.

Scans are done using a Hewlett Packard Scanjet 7490C flatbed scanner. The wiring diagrams are scanned into Photoshop and assembled with the Photomerge program into high resolution .TIF files. Scanning settings for the electrical diagrams are import-wia-Hewlett-Packard, using custom settings Brightness=0,Contrast=71,Resolution (DPI)=250.

The best part is how they print out. Using just legal paper in a HP Photosmart 7350 color printer (cheap and available at Staples and other Office Suppliers) the color wiring digrams print beautifully and dare I say it, rival the originals. The black and white diagrams print equally well on a HP Laserjet 4+ printer. The files are quite large, but with todays technology (large drives, DVD) each manual set (text and diagrams 65-71, 72-83, 84-89) each will fit on a DVD.

Thought this might be useful to others using the manuals-
You can print up nice disposable wiring worksheets and not mess up the originals. I tried to upload one as an example here, but the file is too large.