Hayes manual wrong? install thermostat - windstar

Use manuals as a guide, not gospel. Trust your own eyes and experience. Also take careful note of the relationship between parts when you disassemble them. I trust factory manuals more than third party stuff like Haynes. But I still use my own judgement as to whether the factory manual is right or wrong.

Absolutely. They're garbage, just as bad as the Chilton's manuals. The only acceptable book is the FACTORY service manual. I do not understand why people attempt DIY repairs with anything less, FSMs are easy to get in North America.

DS

It's probably because of the cost which is approaching $100.

Still worth it IMNSHO.

Exactly. How long does it take for a $100 factory shop manual to pay for itself? The first time it's used. After that, it's all free.

The problem is, that the factory manuals seem to go out of print after a couple years, but it is getting better in that regard. But this is what spawned the Haynes, Chilton, Motor, etc manuals.

The 'Motor' ones are decent, but I haven't seen one that is newer than the 1970s or early 80s, I dunno if they are made anymore. The instructions are brief, but more accurate than the other two. I've found going in without a manual is better than hanyes or chiltons. No information is better than wrong information.

No argument here. If I'm going to own a car for more than two years, I always get a shop manual.

The only time I ran into a FSM that was crap was with an '85 nissen sentra: clutch job: step one: remove transmission transmission: step one, remove shifter... To do a clutch job, the FSM would have one removing the shifter knob!

|On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:08:00 GMT, Brent P wrote: |> In article , TCS wrote: |>> On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 10:42:23 -0400, Daniel J. Stern wrote: |>>> On 29 Sep 2003, Cameron wrote: |>>> |>>>> This whole thing got me to thinking, are there frequent mistakes in |>>>> the Hayes manuals? |>>> |>>> Absolutely. They're garbage, just as bad as the Chilton's manuals. The |>>> only acceptable book is the FACTORY service manual. I do not understand |>>> why people attempt DIY repairs with anything less, FSMs are easy to get in |>>> North America. |>> |>> It's probably because of the cost which is approaching $100. |>> |>> Still worth it IMNSHO. |> |> Exactly. How long does it take for a $100 factory shop manual to pay |> for itself? The first time it's used. After that, it's all free. |> | |No argument here. If I'm going to own a car for more than two years, |I always get a shop manual.

When I acquire a car that I intend to work on, I acquire all the docs I can get

- GFSM, Haynes, Chilton (now owned by Haynes), aftermarket tuning books as available, tech pages from the internet. I put the latter into a 3-ring binder The more you know about a job you are about to tackle, the better it will go.

Rex in Fort Worth

Haynes manuals are just a guide, nothing more. Sometimes they are off the wall and a little tongue in cheek, such as one that said to use the kitchen table if you needed a workbench and you did not have one in your garage.

They are done from the point of view of the DIY shadetree mechanic, IMO.

For my 1997 Nissan, Nissan recommends 5W-30 oil for all temperatures (maybe 10W-30 OK for hotter weather), but Haynes mentions nothing thinner than 10W-30 and recommends it only when the temperature won't exceed 40 deg. F. In the chapter about brakes, they mentioned attaching the bolts for the "torque member" but didn't explain what it was (I had the same problem with a Chilton's or AllData about suspension height -- they showed how to measure it but didn't say what it should have been), but an older edition fo the book did (didn't apply to my brakes anyway). And a lot of the information wasn't written specifically for my particular model (same for Chilton's and AllData), such as the dashboard disassembly instructions and wiring harness mechanical diagrams (one drawing even says "Datsun," meaning it was made several years earlier).

When Haynes shows a mechanical diagram, such as for the suspension, they leave off the torque specifications and require that you look them up in a separate table, even when there's only one set of torques for every vehicle described by that diagram. Worse, some of the descriptions in the tables aren't very clear, and in the case of my brakes it was easy to mix up two different sets of bolts, one to be torqued to around 20 ft-lbs, another for about 50-70 ft-lbs. I don't know if Mitchell does this, but I've seen factory manuals where the diagrams included all the torques.

I have the Haynes manual for my car, but from my experience with it, DJS' comment (the G word) isn't far off the mark. It was less useful than a Tagalog translation of the Qu'ran in terms of getting my faulty thermostat replaced, for example. But $125 for a Mazda FSM? (Hey, didn't you say you had a copy floating around you could sell me? :) Deities, I can get a LOT of work done by my trusty back street mechanic for that. Otoh the Haynes manual wasn't all that cheap and has proved disappointing thus far - $29 probably not particularly well spent. I should probably have known better; after all it claims to be valid for *all* '83 thru '91 626s and MX6s, which just hasta be fishy.

The chilton manual would have been for all japanese cars from '35 to '05.

I was rather amused when chilton's 70's VW beetle manual made a reference to water cooling in it's troubleshooting section.