Seems to me that this wheel has already been invented,
and is precisely the intent of John Meeks' "BTDT" site
with its Vanagon Mailing List Archive Library:
http://www.vanagonauts.com/

John has set up a nicely organized series of folders
and subfolders, arranged to coincide with the chapters
in the venerable Bentley manual. Many of the folders
are presently empty, and the modular infrastructure
anxiously awaits your submissions of valuable tips and
definitive Vanagon procedures.

If everyone submitted just one or two of their
favorite posts from the mailing list over the years,
we'd soon have a very complete and comprehensive
collection of valuable advice. This would be a
collective group undertaking, thus would not require a
Herculean effort by any one individual. We each chip
in and do a bit of it, and the contents are
self-rating for relevancy.

Granted, it must still be accessed via the internet,
which could slow things down when trying to search
from the road. But as George Goff so pointedly
suggested, much of the archives is comprised of
flotsam and jetsam, with kernels of truth lying
within. John's Library could be the pure and
unadulterated distillation of those golden Vanagon
truths.

I don't know in what format John is collecting the
posts, but perhaps to make it portable for take-along
convenience, he could burn a batch of CD/DVDs every
year or so. He could probably just load the whole darn
website on a CD, and a broken-down Vanagonaut could
browse the site right from the CD.

Jeffrey Earl
1983 diesel Westfalia "Vanasazi"
http://www.vanthology.com/

"OK, I'll leave it at that since I've already gone on
for far too long about something I don't know a whole
lot about ..."

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