Best Shop Manuals for '94 Explorer?

Is throttle body cleaner OK to use on them?

All that was left on the web site you mentioned was the price so that's why I asked if that was what you paid. Green is a good color for Explorers.

One of my dogs knows how to roll the windows up and down. The first couple of times she did it by accident and got her head stuck in there while rolling it up!!! Now I know why they have the window lock in the cockpit. She now does it with a bit more control.

Yea, my Explorers are mainly for bad roads too but I've found that mountain trails are very nice to get away from most of the people. We like to go up and play in the snow and find a place where the dogs can run around without getting run over.

Last winter the roads here were almost unpassable--the only cars/trucks that made it were my Explorers, one F250, 2 raised minitrucks, and a front-wheel drive minivan. I think it was a Chrysler. I don't think it occured to the driver that not making it was an option so he perhaps was succeeding via conviction ;-) There is also a white Jeep Grand Cherokee that I saw drive back and forth and never stuck in the mud so I guess they made it too. The road is alongside Tucalota Creek and we started calling the road Stuckalotta Road. It was so bad that people at the top of the hill were cheering when I made it without getting stuck!

OK, ya caught me BS' "The safest way to clean them is Denatured-Alcohol and a swab. Never soak the sensor or spray anything directly on it. Wet the swab with the alcohol and gently rub the filaments on all exposed sides."

The article:

-Paul

Drat, I hope you see this old post. I just wanted to know if you got your shop manual CD yet and which one did you get and how much and where. I'm beginning to run into things that my Hayne's manual does not cover. Thanks.

BTW I could not reply to your post via email cause Netscape won't let me. I'm not even using Netscape.

Yes, I did get it, and poked around in it a bit. It cost me $10, including shipping. I just did the "buy it now" thing. It comes as a disk image, and uses some disk image mounting software to mount the disk image in WinXP. It requires WinXp, btw. Then you can run the Ford program and go thru the menu. It's not very easy to use, you have to go thru multi-levels to get to the info you're after. As a test, I tried to look up the procedure for replacing the radius arm bushings. The section for the 4WD did not have it. I finally found it in the 2WD section. I also expected to find a lot of detail on overhauling the engine, though I'm too lazy to do that. I couldn't find anything on that.

The search function is pretty lame, it only searches the page you are looking at, not sub-menus. So searching for "radius" was never going to find "radius arm bushing" while in the 4WD front suspension section.

It does have good info on reading the engine codes and so on, which is the stuff I'm most likely to need. So for $10, it was an OK deal. There are many people selling these disks on EBay, so it's possible that others are better.

Yeah, sorry, that isn't a valid email address any more. It was a free one I was using as a spam deflector, and the site went under.

-Paul

I found one (actually two) on eBay for $11 each but it didn't say it required XP so I guess I'll find out. It would be good if I could stick it in my Win 98 laptop and take it under the car with me ;-) I found one for my '78 F350 that says it'll run on any old computer pretty much (well, maybe not my 286).

Since I bought two ('92 and '97) they ended up only costing me $9 each. Lately I keep running into "take it to a professional" in my Hayne's manual. It would be cheaper to buy a new Explorer than to have someone else fix my old ones.

Since this is the second time you mentioned radius arm bushings I just want to make sure you know that you don't have to remove the coil springs to do it--you can remove the radius arm bracket instead.

I don't know what you mean by "disc imaging mounting software." Sounds complicated.

Yeah, when I was researching what to buy and what to look for I noticed that there were a lot of complaints about radius arm bushings, so I read up on them. They look solid on the one I ended up buying, so I shouldn't need to deal with it.

I don't know why they are using that method, but it's a way to have the whole works on your hard disk, but make it think it's running from a CDROM. It shows up as a drive letter and runs exactly as if it were on a physical CDROM.

I suppose if you have a shop and need this for many years and models it's more convenient than changing CDROMs.

-Paul

Good. It's not really my idea of fun. I've changed mine 3 times on 2 Explorers with a total of 275,000 miles (since they were first changed) so that's about every 90,000 miles they need to be changed, more or less.

I've been reading a lot about ball joints but so far I have not determined how you know when you need to replace them. They must go bad often though judging from all the posts.

OIC I have a poster catalog at my store that works like that and it's a PITA. It's also hard to search. Makes a nice screen saver though...