Re: Poor filing practice?
Not exactly. The thing is that Saturn V was built by so many subcontractors and suppliers that no unified set of plans really existed. NASA would receive completed assemblies and didn't necessarily have all the designs for them because they only needed to bolt it onto the next assembly, or ensure the electrical interfaces played nicely with its neighbours. And if they did have detailed drawings, they did not have exact manufacturing/production schemes of how those assemblies were fabricated and assembled.
Many parts were hand-crafted. When NASA set some junior engineers the task of reverse-engineering the F1 engine a few years ago they found all sorts of oddities on the unflown engines they pulled out of storage. In one case the injector plate at the bottom of the engine had a mark where the drill had come down in the wrong place. These days the whole plate would be rejected (nothing short of perfect). On this one they just moved the drill to the correct spot and carried on. Lots of undocumented modifications and procedures from the fabricators (hand-welding/machining). The (hand-built) F1 engine itself was being developed and iterated so fast that every one was basically a bit different. As the article notes, Apollo 4 flew with a test article Command Module which had been hacked about to qualify some mods for the production version. There was no locked down "Saturn V" specification.
So some stuff was never documented, much of it was spread out around the contractors, and of the stuff NASA had, some has ended up with museums or archives like the Smithsonian and other bits in NASA archives. And even then one set of drawings may only apply to one particular mission.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
