For those of you who have large schematics that are getting older, the FedEx Store/Kinkos has a scanner that will do 42 inches wide x unlimited length.
I had them scan the 3 ft x 5 ft master schematic for my Gates BC-1G. The blueprint had been folded since 1955, was very blue overall and had many splits at the folds. They successfully scanned it, without damaging the original and showed me the original scan which had all the visual faults of the original and then ran it through their clean-up program which got it back to near original 1955 look. The whole process with scanning the large print, scanning the whole manual, including three large fold out schematics, and printing three copies of everything cost just about $100.00. They even included the fancy folds on the fold out schematics in the spiral bound copies and a thumb drive with the whole thing on it. I was seriously impressed!
The problem with large engineering-type drawings done back in the "good old days" with very acidic processes and using today's automatic clean-up programs (I've used the FedEX/Kinko machines in the past) is that they can't always distinguish dark fold line areas from actual circuit lines especially when they fall on top of each other. Where the dark fold lines fall over circuit information, you generally have to go to a manual process and clean it up by hand. One tip to remember if you have any of these old large engineering-type drawings with multiple folds. At each fold where one side of the actual drawing side lays on the another drawing side (I call it the "print-to-print" side), put a clean sheet of white paper between them at the fold. This will reduce both printed sides from interacting with each other making even wider darker areas at the fold points.
I've diddled with hundreds of these engineering-type drawings (2X, 4X, 6X, 8X) over the years that have dark fold lines and where paper that has turned various shades of brown. In many cases, when machine cleanup processes get you only so far, water-based "white out", will take you the rest of the way. Sometimes, depending on the drawing and the nature of its faults, reverse imaging processes (white on black rather then black on white) actually work better to produce a good useful drawing.
This is how the 36 x 70 inch main schematic came out after cleanup...
http://bh.hallikainen.org//uploads/GregCotton/Blueprint36X70.pdfIt was ugly before they cleaned it up, I'm not sure how much of that was manual work and how much was the automation.
I dumped the whole manual and schematics into the archive over there if anyone needs it.
