Bicycle Mechanics - Where are the old manuals?

Just a little hot and bothered right now. I don't understand why bike and parts manufacturers rarely have manuals available on their sites for products older than 2002. Don't they have some intern that could devote a week to tracking down old manuals, scanning them, and emailing them to the web guys?

Nobody does it, so they all get away with not doing it. Their focus continues to be selling new bikes, not keeping the old ones up and running. No return on that spending. That's one reason many/all of the tribute sites are independent, put together by individuals that just love the brand, with little/no assistance from the manufacturers. Its a business, and none of the manufacturers thus far have seen a return on the cost to scan, host, and support such an effort. Its sad, as you would think they have a stack of old catalogs and manuals laying around.

You look for individual components, a 'Bike' is a sum of its parts..
and the parts, chosen to be fitted, are a product manager's decision.

Paul Lange (http://www.paul-lange.de/service/support/handbuecher-archiv.html)

If the manufacturers put there old catalogs on their websites what would all of us over in C&V do?

Why on earth would they want to help you shop on ebay for used/nos/old/vintage parts? There isn't any (much) money in supporting old hardware.

If you learn a little Italian and HTML, you can find stuff like http://www.campagnolo.com/repository/documenti/it/spares98-A.pdf (http://www.campagnolo.com/repository/documenti/it/spares98-A.pdf)

I got fancy put a "B" in the file name and hit paydirt for my hub...

This would be a great topic for a sticky thread on C+V.

Just sayin'. If the copyright issues were not too threatening (maybe
allow links only?) it would be an incredible resource.

I bookmark every link I see on here to this stuff.:thumb:

I assume most of you know about the site that hosts all of Trek's older catalogs but for those who don't and are interested: http://www.vintage-trek.com/

And of course there's Bikepedia that at least lists (mostly) the components of bike models back to the mid/late '90s.