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| About Collector Car Companion
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If you're like most collector car hobbyists, your enjoyment comes as much from restoring, refreshing or maintaining your
vehicle as it does from driving it around or showing it off. If this sounds familiar, then Collector Car Companion is
for you! Made for antique, classic, custom, hot rod and muscle car owners, Collector Car Companion is a powerful and
flexible PC software program that will soon become one of your favorite tools, as indispensable as any in your garage or
workshop. Read on to learn about some of its many features, and check out the example project and
fully functional trial version absolutely FREE.
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“A very versatile tool. I used it to restore my show truck,
and perform routine maintenance on my daily driver.”
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Organize Your Parts
Everyone in the collector car hobby knows the importance of parts. We're constantly restoring parts, replacing parts,
hunting for parts at swap meets or in bone yards, or just cleaning and maintaining parts. Collector Car Companion lets you record details,
notes and pictures about parts as you remove them from the vehicle, or acquire them from a swap meet or supplier. Collector Car Companion
generates a unique number for each part you enter so you can quickly find it later, along with the information you cataloged about it. It
can even print a label for you to tag the part, invaluable later when you are trying to identify or locate a part.
Collect Car Companion also lets you identify the restoration tasks required for each part. It comes with a number of common tasks already
defined, and you can easily add and change tasks to meet your particular needs. Powerful reporting facilities allow you to identify
what parts need to have a specific task performed on them, and can even produce a packing list when sending parts out for repair. You'll never
again spend extra money resending a couple of additional parts you forgot to include in the original shipment. And when the parts are returned you
have a check-off list to make sure everything is returned.
Organize Your Work
Handy job lists show what needs to be done to finish restoration on a part
or group of parts, or list the parts that need a particular task carried out on them (like chroming). This makes it easy to check parts back in when
they come back from a restoration or supply shop. And Collector Car Companion's intuitive menu system provides a quick visual indicator of which
parts, groups and phases are complete, letting you know exactly where you are in the project.
You can also create a list of component parts - nuts, bolts, gaskets, required for restoration or reassembly. The reporting
feature allows you to create a shopping list, great if you want to tackle a job over the weekend and don't want to keep running to the shop
for parts. It also makes a great wish list to bring with you to a swap meet or bone yard.
Organize Your Photographs
Collector Car Companion lets you organize your digital photographs, with the ability to add detailed notes and comments. When
reassembling the parts, the photographs come in handy to remind you of how the part was originally fixed to the vehicle. Combined with the notes
entered when the part came off, it's almost like traveling back in time to see how the part was removed. No more head scratching trying to remember
how, where and possibly why the part was fitted.
A powerful search engine is included. Using search you can identify what a part is and all of the notes and photographs you have entered
about it from its unique reference number. This is helpful when you don't recognize a part, or can't remember where you cataloged it.
When the restoration is complete you have a fantastic record of the work you carried out, very useful if you or a friend decide to
restore a similar vehicle, or to show to prospective purchasers.
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Quickly Catalog Parts & Components
Collector Car Companion has been designed to help make the restoration of your classic car, truck or motorcycle quicker, easier and more enjoyable. It does this by helping
you catalog parts as they are removed from the vehicle and giving you the opportunity to make notes and take photographs that will help when you reassemble the vehicle.
You can specify whether a part is to be restored or replaced. If you are restoring a part then you can create a list of restoration tasks that need to be performed
on the part. As you can have common restoration tasks, such as blasting or chroming, you can build a list of these tasks and select them as required. To help you
get started we have included some common restoration tasks.
During restoration and assembly it's likely you will need component parts to complete the job. Components include nuts, bolts, washers, gaskets, oil, etc. When adding a
part's details to Collector Car Companion, it's a good idea to note the components you need during assembly, particularly if a component breaks or is destroyed during strip down.
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Easily Link Digital Photographs
With the availability of inexpensive digital cameras you have the ability to take lots of photographs of your project. Taking many photographs during the
strip down phase will prove invaluable when reassembling your vehicle. Our rule of thumb - you can never have too many photographs! Snap away, and just delete
what you don't need later. Once the images are stored on your PC, you can easily link to them with Collector Car
Companion, adding a brief description and notes to further explain what the picture is showing. Collector Car Companion lets you zoom photographs in and out,
allowing you to see an area in greater detail. You can also rotate the image for a better view. Picture clarity, especially when zooming in, depends on your camera's
resolution. We recommend taking photographs at the highest resolution possible so that the picture can be examined in detail later.
It's best to enter information about a part and whether it needs replacing or restoration as you take parts off, but you don't have to do it then.
After all, you may initially think a part can be restored, but after cleaning it you may decide to replace it. Collector Car Companion gives you the flexibility
to add and change this information as your project proceeds.
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| Intuitive Menu System
Collector Car Companion has an easy to use menu system - you don't need to be a computer genius to use it. When adding a part for the first time,
Collector Car Companion will give it a unique part code, that you can use to mark the part in some way. If the part is to be stored in a bag or box, a label can be
applied to the outside. For larger items labels can be either stuck or tied on. Collector Car Companion can print labels with this information using a label printer.
It prints the unique part number along with the location of the part and the name of the part, assuming these have been entered, on one neat label.
How you arrange the information in Collector Car Companion is up to you. Aside from having the three phases, Strip Down, Restoration and Assembly,
you can group parts together to suit the way you work. For example, if you are restoring an engine you could group all the cylinder head valves together and treat
the valve, spring and guide as one part, or create a 'valve' group and separate the valves, springs and guides as individual parts. Collector Car Companion is very
flexible and works around the way you work. You can add lots of detail on some parts and a little on others. You can treat a whole assembly or sub-assembly as a
single part, or break them down into as many parts as you need.
Quickly Find Your Information
Collector Car Companion includes powerful search capabilities so you can find the information you need quickly and easily. The intuitive tree
structure shows the restoration phases along with the groups, parts, photos and components you have defined, so it's easy to find what you're looking for.
With Collector Car Companion's powerful yet simple search facility, you can quickly and easily find parts and their associated information and photographs. Additionally,
you can search across notes and descriptions, invaluable if you know you made a note about something but can't recall where you put it. Try doing this with hand
written notes and a note book!
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