After spending some time scanning photos the last few weeks, I’ve started working on other things my Dad had that were related to the Triumph GT6. This includes a packet of 14 handwritten pages my grandfather wrote out for my dad in 1985 during the last few days of his life. He mentioned a couple of times in his notes that he was “doing this from memory,” so it’s pretty obvious he had realized at this point that he was not coming home from the hospital.
My grandfather, I believe, focused more and more on this car after my grandmother passed away in 1976. He was meticulous in how he maintained the vehicle and knew where every single part was, when he had last worked on it, and so on. His notes to my father describe every single part, what shelf to find it on, and when to install it.
If it was something that my grandfather had rebuilt, he noted the mileage when he did it and when to keep an eye out for the need to do it again. He told Dad to look under the living room couch for extra windows and in the refrigerator for rebuilt master cylinders, coated in brake fluid to preserve them. These notes are just incredible.
Since Dad passed in July, I’ve been immersed in a massive project to scan family photos from a variety of sources: mine, my mom’s, my dad’s, stacks of photos and albums from his brother and parents, childhood photos from when my brother and sisters were growing up…
My office floor was covered with boxes of photos, tin cans from the 60s that my grandmother had stashed photos in to keep them safe, even loose piles of photos that I’d found here at our house.
So far, I’ve scanned around 3,300 photos (comprising 1.78GB of data) and I’m mostly done now. I’ve also started a new Facebook group to launch a project to track down families of my paternal grandmother’s siblings in hopes of giving them these priceless photos of their ancestors that were in my grandmother’s albums.
Basically, I separated the photos into batches based on source. For example, batch 1 is dad’s photos albums, batch 2 is my grandmother’s photo albums, batch 3 is her loose photos. I ended up with 11 batches of photos, all of which are full-sized scans up to 8.5×11″ and containing anywhere from 1 to 8 images. The next phase is to split the images out and optimized them digitally, though that’s a much longer-term project and a significant time investment.
A number of folks have asked me what I used to scan them. There’s a simple answer here, but for most people, a little more detail will be helpful. I had a lot of older, fragile photos, like the 3×3″ photos from the 40s and 50s. These need to be handled carefully, so a flatbed scanner is preferable, and a higher resolution is necessary since blowing them up will result in quality loss if they are scanned at a lower resolution.
The Canon CanoScan LiDO 400 flatbed scanner is perfect for this task and priced very reasonably at $90-120, though finding it in stock takes some patience. It scans at resolutions up to 4800 dpi, so I’m able to take one of my grandmother’s small photos from 80 years ago, or a wallet-sized portrait of my dad in his police uniform, and blow them up to an 8×10″ print with no real loss in quality. It scans a page in 8 seconds, but this assume 300 dpi, with higher resolutions taking longer to scan. This will make more sense in a moment when we compare it with another option below.
If you have newer photos and no plans to print them in a much larger form (i.e., you have 4×6″ prints and aren’t likely to want to print 8×10’s of them) then scanning at 300 dpi is perfectly sufficient. You can find more information about scanning resolutions here. And since you aren’t scanning older, fragile photos, you should go for speed.
The Plustek ePhoto Z300 photo scanner is probably your best bet, and would do in an afternoon what I spent close to a week doing with a flat bed. This scanner is slightly more expensive at around $200, and it’s limited to 300 dpi, but it scans a 4×6″ print in only 2 seconds and has a bulk feeder. It’s definitely the way to go if you’re just trying to make digital backups of photos, which everyone that has prints should do.
I have a list of things I need to do with the GT6 to make it ready and safe to drive on the road. It’s roadworthy and legal, but there are a couple of things I’d like to check off before taking it anywhere farther than the neighborhood. For example, I want to change the oil since I don’t know when my Dad last did this. And I’d like to have the brakes looked at — they seem mushy — because I feel like they should stop me faster if I put the brakes on hard.
Today, I set out to do the oil change. And I failed.
https://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022-09-04-sump-plug-gt6.jpg6001200David Carrhttps://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/davidcarr-us-logo.pngDavid Carr2022-09-04 14:07:052023-01-08 22:20:58Getting Beat By An Oil Plug
