Looking for old instruction books.

[Chills]

Hello everyone! I was wondering if you all could help me out. Last week, while back in my hometown, I went to my parents' house on a mission: to recover my old LEGO sets. My mother swore she never threw anything out, and after an hour of hunting through my old closet we opened the last plastic bin and "AHHHHHH" there they were. ALL of the LEGOs I had as a child, before my dark ages. Score!

So now I have all of my old sets, but they were all in that denim bag with the red-rope drawstring... disassembled.... and mixed together. I know I saved all of the instruction books, but they weren't in the bin, and we didn't have time to search the closet.

Is there any kind of site where people share PDFs of their instruction books? I know I could buy them on Bricklink, but I am hesitant to spend the money where I could probably find the actual books when I go back to my folks' house. I am just a bit impatient and would like to start rebuilding the sets sooner rather than later. I also checked on LEGO's site and they don't have anything this old. I'm talking from 1979 to 1989, castle, town, and space sets.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[1974]

peeron.com and letsbuilditagain.com amongst others

[Alasdair Ryan]

Well your in luck....try peeron or Toysperiod.

[Chills]

Excellent! Thanks guys!

Two more sites to add to my LEGO bookmarks folder.

[L@go]

I'm quite fond of www.brickfactory.info myself. It's not PDF based, but works very well and has done so for years.

[Roger_Smith]

I faced a similar problem. In the end, the easiest way to hunt down actual pdfs is to just google Lego, the set number and .pdf. That will turn up a result pretty much everytime.

You could try downloading them all from the same site, like peeron, but for me that would only work for a couple and then I'd be faced with long waiting times, for whatever reason.

edit: spelling.

Edited April 17, 2013 by Roger_Smith

[Chills]

Also good advice, thanks.

PDF files are preferable, just because I like keeping them in my iPad book library; but I'll take any instructions so I can re-assemble my sets.

Using the sites posted I was able to find instructions for all of the sets. Thanks!

[JopieK]

one could make a generator for that of course :)

[tomdobs55]

I don't know if it's available for ios but I have a great app on my android phone called Lego scans. It have instructions for pretty much every set I can think of that was released before 2010

[Lego Otaku]

I faced a similar problem. In the end, the easiest way to hunt down actual pdfs is to just google Lego, the set number and .pdf. That will turn up a result pretty much everytime.

You could try downloading them all from the same site, like peeron, but for me that would only work for a couple and then I'd be faced with long waiting times, for whatever reason.

edit: spelling.

Register with Peeron, it seems to get rid of waiting period. If you are getting a time out, it's probably something new or bugged since the last time I used peeron I didn't have any waiting to do.

[LEGO Historian]

On Peeron there is a limit as to how many images you can look at... not sure what that limit is... but I reached it once when I was doing some large volume checking.

[Chills]

Following Roger_Smith's advice I found a bricks.argz. It had a very easy-to-use interface and most of the instructions for which I was looking. I think there is a limiter on that site similar to Peeron's, because after downloading a number of PDFs I got time-out errors and had to wait about 30 minutes to look again.

BTW, just finished rebuilding the first set: 6955 Space Lock-Up Isolation Base. Good times. :)

[bilda]

I faced a similar problem. In the end, the easiest way to hunt down actual pdfs is to just google Lego, the set number and .pdf. That will turn up a result pretty much everytime.

That's a useful tip. Thanks Roger. I've used peeron in the past but it can be slow as you say