Etude Bugatti, gestion electronique de documents, logiciel ged geide, scanner de production ged

The Molsheim Drawings
We are making steady progress with scanning and indexing the BOC collection of Bugatti Molsheim drawings. The Club and the Trust together purchased the computer, the database software and the A3 scanner from Canon UK Ltd last year. To enable us to print out copy drawings we upgraded the old photocopier to a digital one, which can work as a printer for the copy drawings.

There are about 30,000 drawings in the collection which, for post first world war Bugatti cars, their assemblies and components, is nearly the total output of the Molsheim drawing office and also includes the car drawings produced in Paris. There are also a few T34 aero engine and T50B aeroplane drawings and some earlier Molsheim drawings.

The Club originally purchased the collection so that definitive information would be available in order to support owners and restorers of cars in their efforts to work to original Bugatti detail design. This service continues and we provide about 245 drawings for this purpose each year. Most of the component drawings show the design of the part with full dimensions and machining tolerances and give a brief material specification. Some complex parts such as camshafts might show the stages of manufacture from blank, through the turned stage with circular cams to profiling, grinding and heat treatment.

The drawings are nearly all dated and signed or initialled. They often have notes such as 'premier execution, jamais realizé' or a list of car types to which they applied and how many of those components were needed for each car. Normally, when any single part was redesigned, (such as upgrading a straight cut gear to a spiral one) the old drawing was cancelled and a reference added to the new drawing number and date.

The whole drawing collection is a wonderful record of the car building activity at Molsheim not only of the well-known Types but also of exotic prototypes and experiments. The primary purpose of digitising the drawings is to safeguard the unique collection by creating a back-up system. The old drawings have a finite 'life' however careful we are with their handling. We are pleased with the Canon 'Scanfile' database system although the scanning and indexing task is huge with so many drawings. Each drawing has to be passed through the scanner and its image checked on a monitor. If it is too light or dark it has to be rescanned. The drawing number, its title and date has to be entered via mouse and keyboard. One person can process between 50 and 150 drawings in a half day or full day session. So far we have more or less completed about 10% of the whole collection and all T13, Brescia, T27, T22/23, T28 and T30 drawings are in the system. Most of this work has been done by a few volunteer helpers at the Trust - we owe them a continuing and increasing debt of thanks. We really need a few more volunteers. If you could help - perhaps a half day occasionally - please call the Trust.

One aspect of the system that we are particularly pleased with is the good quality of monitor images and reprinted copies from poor low contrast originals. Another great advantage of the new system is its search capability. Our old method of finding a drawing is to look up the number in the Molsheim parts lists. The parts lists are not comprehensive or complete and often the only way is to manually search through the boxes of drawings, which can be a long and frustrating process. The Scanfile database has a very powerful search facility. You can search on any word, group of words, number or date. So, for example, if you are looking for an obscure oil union for your T30 you can simply enter the word *huile* and be presented immediately with a full list of all the T30 drawings with that word in their title. It is easy and quick and in the future we should be able to allow visitors to browse through the database for their own research purposes.