Repair Manuals: Haynes vs Clymer vs Chilton

Recently I bought an '89 Grand Caravan with the 3.0 liter engine. I bought a manual for it the same day I bought the van, both because I knew I'd need it eventually and because I wanted to learn about the vehicle.

The only manual Auto Zone had in stock for my van was the Haynes Repair Manual for 1984 through 1995 Dodge Caravan, Plymouth Voyager and Chrysler Town & Country mini vans.

I am disappointed with the manual. I've not yet used it for any major procedure but I've already spotted several omissions. In chapter 1, it begins by showing pictures of the engine compartment, with the major components identified. A picture of the 2.5 liter is shown, as is the 2.6,

3.3 and 3.8. But no photo of my motor, the 3.0.

I wanted to look up the oil pressure, and the engine idle speed. 3.0 liter oil pressure: "Not available". Idle speed: "Not adjustable". Great, but what would be wrong with telling me what it is supposed to be?

A much larger omission is that there is no mention of the Body Control Module (BCM) anywhere in the entire manual.

Is this as good as it gets? Would a Clymer or Chiltons manual be better?

Reply to
Tony Sivori
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(long list of Haynes deficiencies snipped)

This is the reason for the standard advice, found on this newsgroup many times from many people: don't waste your time and money; get a factory service manual. Yes, they cost several times what a Haynes (etc) will. But they cost much, much less than you can expect to spend on maintenance over the life of your vehicle.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

You'd be better off doing an internet search and see if somebody is selling a copy of the Chrysler shop manual for your vehicle. As a general rule, Chilton, Haynes, and the others are pretty useless.

Bruce

Reply to
Bruce Yelen

That's because AutoZone sucks.

You need a *factory* service manual for your van. That's the one written and put out by Chrysler. Nothing else -- NOTHING ELSE -- will substitute. Haynes, Chilton's, Clymer, etc. are all garbage.

The correct manual is a 3-volume set, and you'll have no trouble finding a used set on Ebay.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

I disagree with that. Why bump the cost of every vehicle up when only a small fraction will need, use, or otherwise be willing to buy separately the FSM. Overall cost to every consumer would increase - more than just the amortized cost per manual of the fraction of a percent that would otherwise purchase it, but the amoritzed cost of many many times that - so overall costs for everyone would go up much more than the total cost of just the ones that are actually needed (i.e., actually sold today to those willing to pay the price). And I'm not a tree hugger, but think of the wasted paper of all those totally unused manuals sitting around. If we still had outhouses, that would be one thing.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

Another adamant vote for the factory manual. A Haynes cost me $260 and the substitution of a perfectly good original factory alternator with the best available but still inferior aftermarket one because the "Typical" schematic left out a fuse that was inline with the hot wire that was visibly hidden on the vehicle. Let's see: Haynes manual $15. FSM would have cost $95. First time out on that vehicle, it cost me $260 unnecessarily , plus I ended up with an inferior alternator. Did I save money by buying a manual that cost less that 1/5 the cost of the FSM? You do the math.

IMO, the worst part of the aftermarket manuals is the "Typical" shematics that cover too many years and vehicle variations. A scehmatic either applies to your vehicle and is a great aid in troubleshooting, or it isn't. It would be like saying: "I want to drive from New York to Chicago - hmmm - any typical map will do. Here - here's one from LA to Seatle - I'll just use that one."

An alternative to the hard copy FSM is www.alldata. For $25, you get real-time on-line access to info right out of the FSM, plus full text of all TSB's for your vehicle. That's for a 1-year subscription. It's $15 for any additional vehicles and renewals.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

Haynes is garbage: Chilton & Clymer are good. It helps to get one for your

*specific* vehicle, but they have very useful info even if they cover several models. Of course, there is no substitute for the factory service manual if you can afford it. Personally, I usually don't need any more info than the Chilton or Clymer has, but I've been building my own cars for 35+ years now. My Haynes for my bike dosen't even cover how to static time it; ever tried to time a bike that's not running with a timming light? :-( ~ Paul aka "Tha Driver"

Giggle Cream - it makes dessert *funny*!

Reply to
ThaDriver

No. Haynes is garbage, Chilton & Clymer are also garbage.

Haynes, Chilton and Clymer don't publish books for *specific* vehicles.

Useful for lining a birdcage or a cat litter box, not for fixing vehicles. FAR too many errors!

If you can't afford a $45 factory manual, you can't afford any tools to fix a car, either.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

There's a old saying about getting what you pay for. You buy a cheap manual and you get a cheap manual. Spend the big bucks for a real factory manual set if you really plan to work on your vehicle yourself.

Matt

Reply to
Matt Whiting

I disagree with both of you.

A complete FSM can easily fit on a CD and can be in Adobe PDF (which has been reverse engineered to the point that today it need not cost a cent to create PDF's) and of which free readers exist on every computer OS in service, not to mention freeware exists to convert PDF to PostScript so it can be printed. PDF will be around as a standard for the next 50 years at least, if not longer. Not to mention the factory already distributes CD's with service documents to the dealerships on a regular basis.

CD pressings in the volumes the automakers do can be had for pennies per CD, and a factory pressed CD has a lifespan longer than the car will exist, and can easily slip in a pocket underhood, and is immune to underhood temperatures, or could be included in the back of the vehicle owners manual.

And for those that would argue they must have a paper manual and it would cost more to print the manual from CD than buy it from the factory, well the factory can certainly keep selling factory paper manuals for you. I suspect that most professional mechanics these days aren't using paper manuals anymore, I certainly don't see an entire library in most garages I see, and it is only a matter of time before the demand for paper manuals is so low that it becomes uneconomical for them to be printed.

Of course, the factories COULD actually just post the PDF's of the manuals on their websites for anyone to download - but such forward thinking I certainly don't expect from the world's automakers.

Or better yet, the OBD-II standard could be revised to allow for file retrieval from the engine computer, so that if the automakers bothered to put it there, any scan tool could then download a copy of the manual directly from the engine computer and pass it to a desktop computer which could then print it - but of course, this is Science Fiction to the worlds' automakers.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Well, Ted, the cost of distribution is only one part of the cost of the FSM. I would guess a very significant cost is the cost of paying the technical writers and engineers who provide information to the technical writers. Giving away the resulting documentation means that this cost must now be recovered by increasing the price of all vehicles. Their is not free lunch. Why do you think MS charges for its software on CD? It certainly isn't just the cost of replication...

Matt

Reply to
Matt Whiting

PDF is an open standard. Always has been.

Hah! Name *one* file standard that's been around for 50 years! Just one!

Many, if not most, are using subscription services like AllData.

Next, Ted will describe the data rate available via OBD-II; just one of the three *different* protocols will do.

Ted is in Seattle, where information just wants to be free, dontchaknow and everything else *should be* (unless it's coffee, of course)

Hey, Ted, why don't you post the PDF of your book on the web and make it freely available while you're at it? Lead by example, so they say...

--Geoff

Reply to
Geoff Gariepy

This depends on your definition of an "open standard" -- it is certainly a published standard (as opposed to virtually every file format ever developed by Microsoft), but so long as it is controlled by a company some of us will continue to regard it as a proprietary standard.

(it's also a very, very good standard. Adobe obviously learned a lot from Post Script!).

And, incidentally, my 2000 LH body FSM did indeed come on a CD-ROM. I was very disappointed to learn I could only get a Neon FSM on dead trees...

Considering how many computers were in existence fifty years ago, that's hardly fair... I'm not sure the "file" abstraction for electronically-stored data even existed fifty years ago.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

Plain text.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

You need to watch your attributions, Geoff. Near as I can tell, I didn't write a single word in the above, yet you include me in the attribution chain.

Matt

Reply to
Matt Whiting

Sure it is: Hardcopy!

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

Do you mean ASCII or EBCDIC or etc.? :)

I was thinking that the ECMA file interchange standard is almost there, but still a little young.

Reply to
rickety

You mean to say you didn't write:

??

If not, I apologize. It clearly appeared as such (at least to me) in two different newsreaders.

--Geoff

Reply to
Geoff Gariepy

Well, if the lack of a standard can itself be *considered* a standard (by default, I suppose) -- then you are correct. But this is kind of like calling "black" a color in the sense of the what can be found on the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, is it not?

We're talking about machine-readable data, here, Dan, not the contents of the corner newsstand. Just because your human eyes and brain can read it and reliably make sense of it does not mean the same is true with computing machinery. That being said, it certainly is possible for a computer program to "make sense" of plaintext information -- under carefully controlled circumstances. But this is hardly the same thing as a 'standard', you would surely have to agree. Further, not everything emitted by a computer can be described as having conformed to any sort of standard--at least in the sense that its format is widely agreed upon and/or used.

So I'll see your pithy reply and raise you a wordy one. You're up, old man.

The point is this: we don't have 50 years of history to rely upon in order to predict what will and won't be a lasting standard fifty years hence. I submit that the technology we're talking about seems to defy such prediction. That is not to say that some (presumably) antiquated PDF documents will not exist in 50 years -- this will happen by accident, if not design -- but to say that PDF will be the operative

*standard* in 50 years is rather optimistic at best, and sheer, uneducated, hyperbolic folly at worst. (I leave it to the reader to best determine where Mr. Mittelstaedt tends to fall along the spectrum between those two extremes.)

By the way, is it just my filtering at (or not at) work, or did Nomen Nescio's recent absence seem to reverse itself when Ted reappeared on the scene?

--Geoff

Reply to
Geoff Gariepy

To be fair to Dan, ASCII, EBDIC, UNICODE, etc., are not really "file" standards, per se, they're character encoding standards; ways in which we impose order on bits to designate the symbols used in written human language. But your point is well made: interaction with files on a computer system implies the interoperability of standards on several different levels -- character encoding, file formatting, various drive and media standards, etc. The miracle of technology is such that it is difficult to behold and truly appreciate on all of its myriad levels. I've spent 24 years living and breathing computer software to date; I think I could spend another 50 (!) or so more, and still not know half of everything there is to be learned about it, and that doesn't even begin to account for all there is to learn about hardware, networking....

By the way to *which* ECMA file interchange standard are you referring? They've got a boatload of them, from what I can see.

--Geoff

Reply to
Geoff

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