Kaiser-Frazer and Kaiser-Willys service bulletins

I started collecting service bulletins for Kaiser-Frazer products many years ago. In the first issue of the KFOCI Quarterly magazine that I edited in 1985 I published an article on service bulletins. I continued to add to my collection over the years. One goal I had was somehow making this material available to anyone interested in KF cars. I finally realized this goal recently. I was able to borrow copies of a few bulletins I had not been able to find and the complete collection consists of 418 bulletins from KF and 82 from Kaiser-Willys. There are 456 files for the KF bulletins because many revised bulletins are included along with the discontinued versions. All of these (538) were scanned and converted to pdf format resulting in 1173 pages in total.

I used the catalog feature available in the program Adobe Acrobat to make the bulletins searchable. The search function is built in to the free Adobe Reader versions 6 and above for the pc. The full Acrobat or the reader that includes search is required to search the files. The search is rather limited since it was not possible to convert the bulletins to text files with my limited resources--if I could have done that the cost would have been prohibitive. However the catalog feature does allow for search procedures that make it possible to fairly quickly find information without just browsing through 1173 pages!

I recorded four items for each bulletin in the collection. Each of these can be used as the basis for a search either alone or in combination. The four items use the names built in to the catalog feature:

TITLE--this is the actual title from the service bulletin
AUTHOR--I chose this field for the bulletin number
SUBJECT--the group assigned by the factory (with slight changes by me)
KEYWORDS--the year(s) for models covered (last two digits of years separated by space like 52 53)


There are 20 possible SUBJECT entries such as accessory, brakes, body, clutch etc. The factory assigned each bulletin to one of these groups.

If one wanted to search for bulletins on BRAKES the word brakes would be entered in the SUBJECT field of the search. It turns out there are 9 bulletins on brakes that were issued over the years. The search finds these and returns the results listed by titles. The full bulletins are easily displayed with a click of the mouse. With this small number one could quickly determine if any of them may have what was needed. But suppose one wanted just 1949 models coverage. If 49 is entered in the KEYWORDS field under the search for brakes the list produced is reduced to 2 titles. And the search can be made still more versatile. Suppose we are looking for any bulletins on brakes adjustment. One can search for words in the TITLE field. If adjustment is used as a word search in the TITLE field all the titles for brakes that include the word adjustment will display in the results box. There is just 1.

It takes a little time and practice to learn how to search but more detailed instructions are included on the CD with all the files. Of course one can simply read them in random or sequential order without using the search but the search is more fun!