It seems that since the Internet has become "popular," especially outside of the United States, whatever I'm interested in has a huge German following. The search engines will find many references to German pages or forum postings that look like they might solve my problem or answer my question, if only I could read them.

The best solution I had was a native German who sat next to me at work for some time... if I ran across something, he could just read it to me. Since that situation has changed, now I'm on my own (well, guess I could email them to him, but turnaround time might be a bit much :-).

Since the boating world has continued this trend toward several German/Dutch sites that seem interesting, I've been exercising the online translators more... Babelfish was the old favorite, and now I find that Google can do the same... You can feed them words or point them to an entire web page. Google, at least, has a set of buttons which you can add to your favorites that let you send the current page to the translator.

• http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr
• http://translate.google.com/translate_t
  

 

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For a couple of interesting links to play with:

 

• http://www.aluriverboat.de/main_entry.htm - A neat home designed and constructed aluminum river craft
• http://www.boote-forum.de/ - An extensive boating forum
  

There are quite a few resources around online that you (the U.S. Government) has already paid for. Many of them are available free.

On the Origami List , a recent poster commented about:

U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers "THERMAL SPRAYING: NEW CONSTRUCTION AND
MAINTENANCE" Engineer Manual ... it's relatively recent, being dated
29 January 1999.

It's available at:

http://www.usace.army.mil/publications/eng-manuals/em1110-2-3401/entire.pdf

There are many other U.S. Army Corp of Engineers publications available at

• http://www.usace.army.mil

Other items can be found by searching the (pretty well done, actually) Government "search" site at:

• FirstGov.gov
  

I happen to know there is a good "Intro to Welding" manual floating around titled Welding Theory and Application, although a free link to it escapes me at the moment. Its a U.S. Army training manual (its Training Circular TC 9-237 - search for it...). I'm not going to make it available since I'm not sure its "free", but if somebody can find a link or more information about it, please pass it on.