Here is a great trove of older plans for homes, cabins, barns and other structures and projects. These are plans done for the public by the USDA in the 30's, 40's and up until the 1980's.

http://www.ag.ndsu.nodak.edu/abeng/plans/HOUSE.htm

Most of these will need to be updated for a modern project but there are lots of interesting ideas and practical construction wisdom in these plans.

Now, suppose I was greedy and wanted to copy all of these plans to my computer so I could print them or study them off line.  How would I do that ?

What I would do is get an offline browser then I could copy and preserve them to study at will .

Some charge up to $40 for this type of program but here is a free one that works just as good. It may take a little bit to figure it out but I think if I can do it anyone can!!!  Have fun.

http://www.httrack.com    

Note: If you choose to download all these files it will take about 57 mb.

Glenn

Vintage farm plans was a website that spent years scanning in old articles from the do-it-yourself magazines of the 1930's up to the 1970's.

There is some great information here on how to work with materials, recycle and build useful tools, and plans for various projects.

When the owner of the site had to close it down recently, we were honored to be able to move the archive over and host it here on CountryPlans.com. The files needed some tweaking to run on this site so let me know if something doesn't work properly.

Check it out here: http://www.countryplans.com/vintage_farm/index.html

Example of one of the boats you could build:

Open the PDF plan here: http://countryplans.com/vintage_farm//boats/HappyClamSkiff.pdf

John,

I'm so relieved that you managed to save these from being scattered throughout the four winds of cyberspace!  They are a real treasure.

Demian