I have a couple of fiche plates, and today I was able to pick up the master parts catalog, for almost nothing. But do they pretty much just have the same information in/on them?
The microfiche and the catalog have the same information. The issue date is critical - catalogs / microfiche issued on a date closer to the manufacture date will be more accurate than the 1975 Final Revision. Neither catalogue will have all the parts to build a car, only the parts that are for sale by dealers.
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I had never thought of that, but it does make sense that the 1975 final MPC version would have evolved with part substitutions, service parts, etc as compared to one closer to the year of our cars. So as far as finding the original part numbers of what was used, would we want an MPC from the year our cars were produced, or maybe one year after?
The Master Parts Catalog lists the parts the dealer has to sell. Those parts may be different from the assembly line - you have no way of knowing. The assembly part numbers are lost.
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Some of the assembly line part numbers are documented in the Assembly manuals.
However, these were also updated as the year went along.
If we could only get see the engineering release orders …
These were the orders issued to the assembly lines specifying which parts to use.
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My experience is that the public library micro-fiche readers do not provide the magnification needed.
The Ford micro-fiches I have contain about 2000 pages per slide.
Another window into the history of parts is the OSI Catalogs - obsolete, superseded, interchangeable. They will show the history of a part as it is superseded by newer versions. The trick with those is they were released multiple times each year, so you need multiple volumes to track the parts.
There are some that are digitized and searchable on the Ford Parts Wiki website.
The set that I got is dated 1972. Guy was asking 55 dollars. It had been on Craigslist locally for almost a month- and I gave him his asking price, quickly.
2000 pages per microfiche slide? I’d believe 200, but not 2000.
Midlife said “2000 pages per microfiche slide? I’d believe 200, but not 2000.”
Randy -
~200 is the typical library size. I had to use a microscope to read mine. 
The 1965-72 Ford Master Parts Catalog has over 6000 pages.
It comes on 4 microfiche slides with a page array of 28x70.
So my memory was a little off - 1960 pages/slide. (There lots of blank pages.)
Vic Yarberry
Cougars Unlimited LLC
I get a hit on an Amazon Kindle edition for 20 bucks. Anyone tried this?
Wow! I’ve never run across a microfiche slide that large before, let alone a reader that can handle it!
The Ford MPC does not cover Mercury, that’s in the Lincoln Mercury MPC. All of my MPCs are in PDF format. I’ve bought them from various places over the last 20+ years. some are good (Forel Publishing) some are terrible (eBay sources)
Be sure whatever you buy has a proper set of bookmarks for an index. The 65-72 Text book is over 2600 pages, and you’ll need all the help you can get when you first start down this road.
Messy scan. Hope there are clean OCR versions around.
I didn’t realize that the Ford catalog didn’t cover Lincoln Mercury when I bought it. It’s still a very cool mass of paper, and I can still get something out of the exploded views, which is what I wanted the most.
If you’ve got the space (and dosh) I believe Don@WCCC has a full paper set for sale
Better than nothing, that’s for sure.
Link to the landing page for the parts and accessories books. Right click and Save As is much faster than a direct click to open.