Comments on: Find a Shop Manual

By: Funk Ambassador

Funk Ambassador — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:46:34 +0000

MetallicaMan0258,

I am going to restore a couple of N600’s in Texas. I am having trouble finding the Haynes manual. Can you help?

Also, if anybody has advice and recommendations to ease the pain, I welcome your comments. I will be recording my progress and will make available periodically to help anybody after me.

Thanks,

Funk Ambassador
Funkambassador@aol.com

By: JIm Bob

JIm Bob — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:41:35 +0000

I bought the factory service manual set for my 1985 Cutlass Supreme and my 1998 Nissan Frontier off E-Bay. Some of the best money I ever spent as they have helped me do far more detailed work than any lousy Chilton’s or Haynes manual ever could. I also have a complete set of factory 1973 AMC manuals from a sadly departed Javelin AMX I used to own, I also downloaded the factory manuals in PDF format for my departed 1995 Sentra for free off the web on a site that no longer exists. Nothing beats a factory manual.

By: Dirk

Dirk — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:18:01 +0000

I spent $ for a GM factory manual for our family’s POS minivan, a ‘98 Olds Silhouette. I was replacing the struts – a feat worthy of major bragging after you see where the upper strut nuts are and how obstructed they are, and they had locking feature and had to be wrench turned all the way off…no socket would clear. The factory manual says remove upper nuts, then remove lower nuts and attachment bolts. OK – but no mention that the bolts are splined and swaged in! I tried tapping them, wd-40, etc.

I finally after over an hour of head scratching called a professional mechanic friend 1500 miles away at home and he says “You have to bang them out with a sledge hammer, just pound on the ends and they will come out”. Might have been nice to know that little piece of information. Another useless feature is when the manual says cryptically “See removing trim section 9.4″…a section that is typically in the other of the three volumes than the one you have handy.

In contrast, my ‘88 Dodge Shadow ES factory manual was a joy to use. It even was fun to read, and had sort of a history section and theory in the front of all the chapters on why the thing was designed the way it was, was the advantages were and how it worked. I loved that manual. Although the car was OK, it went through 3 head gaskets!

By: mzs

mzs — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:59:25 +0000

That made me laugh. Does Haynes or Chiltons ever reassemble the car though? What is the quote? “Reassembly is disassembly in reverse,” or something very close to that has to be the most common phrase in those books.

By: Greg

Greg — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:40:44 +0000

Don’t forget your public library. I use mine all the time for repair manuals.

By: Travis Morgan

Travis Morgan — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:16:02 +0000

Honda Hookup hosts nearly all modern Honda cars and quite a few motorcylces as well. You have to sign up for a user account to login, but its free and easy. And it's well worth it for the documents contained inside.

By: MetallicaMan0258

MetallicaMan0258 — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:15:37 +0000

I’ve got a service manual for the honda z and n 600 in pdf format available upon request.

By: obfuscator

obfuscator — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 04:07:48 +0000

For copies of both factory and aftermarket manuals, I’ve found Powell’s Books to be a good source. I’ve scored complete factory manual sets for Toyota, GM and Ford products going back to the 1950’s, my MGB and even for obscure stuff like Ramblers and oddball European marques.

Caveat: While the aftermarket manuals are generally easy to find on their website, It can be a challenge to track down their used factory manuals. But they do have them… I can tell you from personal experience that their brick-n-mortar store in Downtown Portland, Oregon generally has several shelves full of them. It’d be worth a direct call to their Burnside store to see what they have in stock.

Not an employee, just a happy customer.

http://powells.com/