Mystery 10-ER Manual
The fact that this thread has recently featured some posts about versions of the 10-E Owner’s Guide is a good segue into this next post. I received a recent eBay purchase today - a version of a 10-ER Owner’s Guide that I had never seen.
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From what I could see in the listing, it appeared to be vintage and not homemade, but it’s clearly not the same front cover graphics and fonts as the Magna-produced manuals.
A little closer inspection revealed a faint feature that solved the mystery.
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I’m not sure if it can be clearly seen in the the above image, but it’s a dealer stamp from Battels Hardware of Whittier, CA. Back in the day, Battels was among the leading independent vendors of Magna/Yuba products, and was generally considered the best source of NOS parts for 10-ERs well after end of production.
A little closer comparison between this manual and an original Magna copy shows some loss of resolution of the photo images - so basically it’s a professionally generated [photo]copy of the original manual, possibly commissioned by Battels to support the users who continued to buy parts there.
Makes sense that a large vendor like that would take this approach when they needed something they couldn’t simply order - I suppose back in those days, DIY was what you did, and not just what you sold!
