This is the bulletin page. The photo above is of an early TR2, and it's appropriate, since the bulletins begin in late 1953, and the "Sports" bulletins dominate the early years. "Sports," in Standard-Triumph vernacular, meant the TR2. It was a new model then, and the bulletins reflect that newness... there were minor manufacturing troubles and even more suggestions for modifications based on rally experience.

A little history is required on the bulletins listed here: Joe Curry, notable figure on the Triumphs mailing list (and owner now of many Spitfire doors <g>) obtained a partial set of Triumph bulletins, some ages old, incomplete, and badly photocopied in some instances. He offered them to members of Mark Bradakis' mailing list for the price of copying the bulletins at the local Kinko's. Soon after, some folks on that list, with Andy Mace's urgings, sought to make the bulletins available in electronic form.

The bulletins shown here are not simply scans of photocopied pages. After some testing by a number of people, it was determined that the file sizes were somewhat large, and the as-scanned quality still left a great deal to be desired. During the summer of 1999, Michael Porter did some testing of possibilities for improving the end result. Using Interleaf, a high-end technical document publishing application, the original photocopied bulletins were scanned in twice, once for OCR conversion, and once for graphics files.

An Interleaf page template was created, and the text from OCR was imported into the template. Each graphic file was then imported into the same bulletin document, and was massaged a bit in the Interleaf graphics editor to remove the ink stains, coffee stains and copier swarf generated by repeated copying.

These finished files were then spell-checked to verify that OCR hadn't made too many mistakes, text was typed in by hand where necessary, and the files were then converted to PDF file format. PDF, in the end, produced the best overall document appearance and the smallest overall file sizes, due to the Adobe Acrobat built-in document compression utility.

The advantages in taking this time to reproduce the bulletins in this way are, first, the readability is better, second, the documents can be printed easily for hard-copy reference, and third, when the collection is complete, all the text is searchable with Acrobat Search. If the bulletins were reproduced in graphic file format only, that word search option would not be possible.

The bulletins, at present, are not complete. Many other years are yet to be finished. As later years are added, Adobe Acrobat catalogs will be added to aid in word searches, and these catalogs will be updated, as required.

The bulletins are organized by year, and by bulletin number, which are further organized by group and sequence. The first bulletin, issued in November, 1953, explains Standard-Triumph's reasoning for issuing bulletins in that fashion, and provides a list of the major mechanical groups on which the bulletins were issued.

Further, a couple of notes are required on using these bulletins electronically. Due to a minor glitch in the conversion program from Interleaf to PDF, the hyperlinks do not work entirely on their own. Each year's worth of bulletins, including the table of contents file, must be in its own folder or directory, named for the year in question, i.e., "1954bul.pdf" and "1954TOC.pdf" must reside in a directory named "1954" in order for the links from the TOC file and the bulletin file to work properly. Each year will be organized and linked in that same fashion.

The files are available through FTP, but once downloaded, a folder of the correct name must be created and the files saved to those appropriate folders in order for the links to work. We will work out a way for all the bulletin files to be available through a master index as those files are created.

The bulletins are not meant to be a sole source of service information. They complement the existing service manuals, and much of the information available in them was likely incorporated into manuals issued by Standard-Triumph in later years. They are, however, meant more to be a ready reference for the restorer and for the driving enthusiast, and, most importantly, as an historical reference which would otherwise not be available to the Triumph enthusiast.

The original set, as copied, is missing many bulletins. If you have a copy of any of the missing bulletins, or have a source for them, and would like to see yours included in the current set, contact .

Refer questions on bulletin production to:

Bulletins available to date:

1953 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 3/10/2000)

1954 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 2/29/2000)

1955 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 3/6/2000)

1956 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 3/11/2000)

1957 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 3/13/2000)

1958 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 3/13/2000)

1963 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 3/29/2000)

1964 — click on each link to download the Table of Contents and the actual bulletin pages. (last updated 3/29/2000)