Hey gents,
I just picked up an Oliver 550 for my daughter to help me out on the farm. Really, I wanted an Oliver 550 but I had to justify getting another tractor. I see several tractor manuals available ranging form $13 to well into the 100's. What tractor manual/brand do yall suggest? some seem to just be a copy of the original, and the quality of the words/pictures isn't that great.

I bought a manual online for a 80's Komatsu dozer I bought a few months ago. I also saw a wide range of prices. I went with nearly the cheapest (the cheapest required a payment form I didn't care for). What I got was a pdf file of scanned images from actual old paper manual. There's a few japanese markings in it someone wrote by hand. There's not enough writing in it to be annoying, just enough to notice and chuckle at.

I suspect most of you are seeing is just pdfs of images from scanning a paper manual. If that's what they all are, I doubt there's any meaningful difference in the product other than price.

Personally I would be willing to pay quite a bit more for a native digital file (instead of scanned images), because I like having the ability to hit control-F and search the whole doc for certain words. But if no-one is specifically calling that out in their product listing, I expect they're all similar scanned images I have to read through instead of search.

I’ve bought some from here before and the ones I got were copy’s but were very good I haven’t had a problem reading them.

https://www.jensales.com/

I was able to print a copy of the Owners Manual online, its not too bad to read. My wife ordered me a Repub manual for the Oliver 550 and it has a lot more info than the owners manual. The pictures are black and white, but most of them are clear enough to see what's going on.

They are pretty simple tractors, thing should go pretty well in your restoration work.