I’m not at all sure it would fly but throwing this out for consideration.
There’s a significant number of J-L members who are or have been heavily into bodywork, me included, and informative discussions around welding, metal shaping, painting etc. frequently crop up in the various model fora. But if you’re restoring a saloon and need help you’re not likely to read about how a member approached a similar challenge in the E-type or XK forum. Most of this stuff is pretty generic and applies across models.
Or, folks could just create and use a “Bodywork” tag to tag any thread about bodywork. The more categories you have, the more things become fragmented, or you get folks posting the same thing in multiple categories. I’m not poo-pooing having a category for Bodywork, it sounds like a good idea to me, but just highlighting the risk of “over-categorizing”. This may be one subject where, as Nick says, bodywork jobs on an E-Type, XK, or MK II, have more in common with each other than they do with the vehicle they are being performed on.
I like Nick’s idea, but consider. . . How many of us post in the XK engine category when we have an engine related question? My concern is it would become another category which captures only some of the wisdom of the entire J-L community.
I agree. There’s not much point in a separate category if much of the content which would fit that category appears somewhere else.
We’ve talked about a general “Shop techniques” category, to cover stuff that we all run into in the shop (chasing threads, drilling out broken bolts, removing stuck hydraulic pistons, shop tricks, and such), but that would still mean that people would post there, rather than in the model category which they normally frequent.
Prefacing in-forum posts with something like, “Instrument Repair,” or, “Identifying which rear end I have,” within each model-specific forum would also help when trying to find info you’d read before, but because of (usually) thread drift, the post that had the info you might be looking for is now difficult to find.
I’ve now created a “bodywork” tag. Anyone (with a certain level of permissions) can tag a (new or existing) thread with this tag, and it becomes searchable using the advanced search option. Or you can use the text “tags:bodywork” in your regular search term and get all threads that (a) match your selected text, AND (b) have been tagged as “bodywork”. I’ve tagged a few relevant threads to get the ball rolling, and illustrate the point. Just type “tags:bodywork” in the search box to view. Hope this helps…
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