Haynes Stops Printing Famous Workshop Manuals | Hacker News Reader

Haynes Stops Printing Famous Workshop Manuals

classicsworld.co.uk

53 pointsKaibeezy60 comments

The first thing I used to do when getting a new (used) auto would be to go buy a repair manual- for some reason I didn’t do that for my wife’s when we bought it.

I (this week) just bought a Hayne’s for my wife’s car as it’s finally getting to that age (5 years old) and I needed to put a new parking brake pedal in.

I couldn’t believe how little detail was in it. I’ve still got my Hayne’s and Chilton’s hanging around for cars I don’t own anymore (all US autos from 1988-2010) and this book is by far the thinnest.

On top of that, there was NO INFORMATION on the parking brake assembly at all. My buddy, a Ford mechanic, broke the bad news to me, the entire lower side of the dash had to come off. This wasn’t some niche model either, it’s an Explorer, which remained largely unchanged from 2011-2018. The documentation for the dash disassembly was basically three pictures, no exploded diagram of the half dozen trim pieces that all interlock, nothing.

Maybe they packed it in a while ago?

I think once CAN bus started becoming ubiquitous beyond OBD-II compliance the effort put into independent repair manuals fell off the cliff.

I have had Jeep vehicles over the years and have made friends on forums who share information: I’ve had almost everything apart on a 2008 vehicle. Mopar sells manuals online if you subscribe to TechConnect but you still really need wiTech to complete many of the procedures.

Automotive repair has been relinquished to tribal knowledge and it’s unfortunate. I think most of us advocate for right to repair but it has such a strong second order effect it doesn’t get the attention it deserves with the broader public.

My dealer is incompetent. One of the techs did burnouts in my car and posted it on youtube 12 years ago. Ever since then I have never used dealer service again. I even went as far as not taking advantage of my warranty once.

> I think once CAN bus started becoming ubiquitous beyond OBD-II compliance [...]

OBD has always been a small subset of what's happening on the CAN bus, or rather busses, nowadays. Some of the vendor specific things are necessarily unique, but a lot of it is deliberately obfuscated and undocumented because of various idiotic things.

There is truth to the electronic systems in a car having become orders of magnitude more complex than 20 years ago, but that in itself doesn't quite cover it.

Some problems arise without actual malicious intent because every itty bitty control module, of which there are nowadays several dozen in every car, is very likely outsourced by the OEMs, and the suppliers are as bad at following specs as the OEMs are at writing them. As market pressures have resulted in OEMs and suppliers having more adversarial relationships, both sides have become less willing to fix the other side's mistakes, and the customer is the one who takes the bath for it. The only ones winning in the automotive industry's OEM-supplier setup are wall-street, as they encourage the race to the bottom just to squeeze all possible short-term value out of the industry (and often taxpayer money) through an endless cycle of bankruptcies, spin-offs, and mergers.

Another problem is an acute lack of competency regarding computer systems design and implementations, as many OEMs are still stuck in processes meant for mechanical components, not electronics and software.

Even subtracting all the above idiocy, the industry as a whole sees no money in providing a servicable automobile. Unless the incentive changes because of consumer behaviour or regulation, nobody's going to put in the extra engineering work to improve the mechanic's "interface" as long as there's simply no profit in it.

Yeah but CAN bus is all about the various electronic modules talking together. The parking brake assembly has a switch on it to detect if the pedal is depressed, IE the parking brake is applied. I could understand not detailing those too much, because even the knowledge won’t help you when your “entertainment module” AKA radio is VIN locked and you HAVE to go to the dealership to deal with it.

There was no mention of the parking brake, the cables, or the fact that the parking brake is tied to the rear brakes in the entire manual.

It was honestly the first time I’ve ever been disappointed with a manual. Then again, all my old books prior to ‘01 are a Chilton which are IMO more technical and precise. Of 8 books, only two are Hayne’s. And Hayne’s bought Chilton some time ago, so I’d be interested if Chilton is more like Hayne’s these days.

There have been two trends that have drastically affected my car repair experience:

- cars have become more electronic, more complicated and more ruthlessly "designed for assembly"

- the cars I could afford when young were usually older than I was and domestic - this meant they were simpler in all respects.

Those two trends have made car repair a lot different over the years and the manuals have become somewhat less useful.

That's disappointing to hear, as for the longest time the availability of parts and repair information for American vehicles was much better than foreign brands.

This is a signal for larger movements in our society:

- OEM products and rebadging, have you ever sent your DeWalt drill back and hoping they'd repair it? They'll just send you a new one.

- Repairability is deprioritized or abandoned

- Throwaway-culture is expanding

- IoT gadgets are providing miniscule feature bait to fish customers into falling for it only to realize it was all a lie

- Increasing thrift through drop-shipping and other goodwill-less businesses don't want to be accountable for their shitty gadget made in Guangduong.

Never has been a better time to build a marketplace that puts the business and their ethics at the forefront, their legacy and goodwill at stake, hold them accountable in a fair competing arena, free of unregulated advertisement and independent reviews (such as iFixit score).

I personally want us to go back to early 1900's where businesses had pride in their history, they truly cared about quality and workmanship. Not saying there aren't businesses like that today, but ffs just look at what Amazon is filled with.

The problem - for customer, at least - that it's hard to find the "quality" of the product. We think that a hundred years ago that was implied, and products without enough quality lost on the market; today the opposite is true.

Can we somehow take into account all those advancements which happened over last century or so in materials science, electronics and software etc. to build a quality-meter for an arbitrary product? So customers could better understand what it really is - that is, how long and well it's going to serve under what conditions - for what they are paying X dollars today?

This is the whole issue. A free market can not possibly correct what it cant see. In this case, consumers are not able to tell how repairable or well built a product is.

Of all the things I have had fail, very rarely do they fail in a way I would have expected. Recently I had a fridge die because the light bulb fried which caused a short somehow on the main board frying the entire board. I could not have possibly predicted this was a problem so I could not have used the info to select a better made product. This fridge was from one of the big name reputable brands.

All of the big and reputable brands are doing the same thing so its almost impossible to find the well built stuff unless you are looking at something trivial like a shoe or non power tool where a basic observation will tell you its build quality.

> All of the big and reputable brands are doing the same thing so its almost impossible to find the well built stuff unless you are looking at something trivial like a shoe or non power tool where a basic observation will tell you its build quality.

Or unless you consult independent consumer research material that does more work than basic observation to quantify quality differences. (The entire value proposition of, for instance, Consumer Reports, which indicates that this isn't a new problem, given how long they've been around with the sole selling point being solving it.)

We rely on basic observations - that worked a century ago, now not so much. We need some better mechanism - especially for people who doesn't know properties, failure modes etc.

I think what we really need is strong, mandatory warranties for everything. It should just be law that an appliance like a fridge or TV are expected to last 10 years (and adjust this value for all expected product lifetimes)

And if samsung pushes out a software update that breaks the original experience (adding adverts for example) you are entitled for at least a partial refund. So if you owned it for 9 years and on the 9th they added adverts, you get a 1/10th refund.

That way it becomes unprofitable to pump out IoT junk and then discontinue support a year later.

> I think what we really need is strong, mandatory warranties for everything.

Maybe, but laws so far are slow and being circumvented in some areas of significant commercial interest. Maybe some technological approach could be better. A crude example - we already have more and more available spectrometers, which can analyze surface composition of many things, from which some properties can be estimated; of course, it's a long way to "quality meter".

> And if samsung pushes out a software update

With software we can have some differential analysis systems. Maybe we can have a working system where the software is analyzable - say, is stored on an easily analyzable module. Then we can try to check changes...

> its almost impossible to find the well built stuff unless you are looking at something trivial like a shoe

Granted, there are no software in shoes. Yet, I'd like to know how you manage to assess the build quality of one without being a professional.

> Granted, there are no software in shoes

Oh, you'd be surprised: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/14/nikes-s...

You don't even have to go that far back!

RIP:

- Hewlett-Packard (err...Agilent, I mean Keysight)

- Tektronics

- IBM Thinkpads

- Screws and modular assemblies

and the declined quality that nearly brings a tear to my eye of:

- Craftsman (the real Craftsman)

- the manufacturer of my old clothes dryer with a schematic of the whole thing taped to the inside of the front panel (at least my new one has WiFi and NFC!)

You can certainly accuse me of rose-tinted glasses, and I probably shouldn't even have nostalgia for a company, but it does really just make me a little sad. Just look at Tek's old employee handbook: https://vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/EmployeeHa...

Signed,

A life-long tinkerer

That Tektronix manual is a gem. Also... a very different age. They set aside 22.5% of gross revenue for profit sharing and 7.5% for a retirement fund. They boasted about a technical library made largely of contributions from the employees. Obviously a white male-dominated roster. The explanation of the phone/paging system is baroque and sort of cryptic, taking 13 steps.

When I was young I wanted to start a company like that (not the white male-dominated part, duh). Then I was sued unjustly in two different cases under California law. I will never have an employee again.

Yeah it always rang true to me as a company that did right by its employees, a mutual respectful relationship. Not to mention engineering was definitely seen as a priority. They even drew little doodles in the schematics.

But yes, an absolute gem and a nice little snapshot in time.

That's a shame about the lawsuits. I'm only bringing up (not blaming at all!) lawyers since it's the example you gave, but thinking about it, I think a sue-happy culture is just one of the symptoms or maybe foreshadowing our slow descent into not assuming good faith on the part of others or trying to lift everyone up rather than extract as much as you can from everyone else. It's as though we've moved from cooperation to being adversarial (in very general terms.)

I suppose that might be why that employee handbook attracts me so much--the contrast between their relationship with their employees is stark against what we seem to have today. Like before, it's a relationship of mutual benefit vs. the asymmetry between employers/employees we have now.

I'm awful with words and getting my ideas out, and I reiterate that I've nothing against law as a profession. It just serves as a nice exemplar.

I dont think you emphasized the "white male dominated" part enough

- The dollar buys less than ever before and will continue to do so.

- Real wages suck compared to, let's say, the "golden age" of driving.

- Because of the above, high quality widgets cost more than ever. You can still find them, but you'd have to see it as an investment.

The problem is with identifying which items are priced representative of their quality, and which are overpriced. Everyone advertises quality, reviews are faked, forums are astroturfed. I’d gladly pay for quality if there was some way to know what I was getting.

I can't believe how much blatant lies there are with products now. I was looking at tools on Amazon since I was given a gift card for it and I see tools listed as being "stainless steel" but in the reviews you have 90% of the reviews saying the product was blessed by Jesus and 10% giving one star reviews with pictures showing the "stainless steel" was rusting immediately and fracturing under normal use.

How does a product flat out lying about its specs and getting called out end up still on the store selling well?

That's due to the "leave a good review and we will give you a gift card" tactic that's been somewhat common these days.

Example: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/here-is-how-they-g...

I understand how the reviews get faked but not why Amazon and the seller get away with flat out lying. The product is clearly not made of stainless steel so its basically fraud to keep selling it knowing its a lie. Obviously something is going wrong with consumer protection laws where a company is getting away with large scale lying about products.

At least with the Milwaukee tools I've had repaired (and that's three so far) they sent back the original tool fixed - I could tell by the markings on said tool.

It's understandable that at some point the "replace" becomes cheaper than "repair" but even now that line can be crossed.

or maybe more about avoiding pollution and environmental effects of printing?

I've religiously bought manuals for all of my cars. The first was a thick Chilton's manual for a 1975 van. It included several brands of vehicles, and both light and heavy trucks. Of course I could not but read the whole thing.

It had instructions such as: "This section assumes that the cylinder head is on a clean, dry surface." And: "Before removing the engine, build an engine hoist such as described on page..."

There was also a comment about what to do upon diagnosing a twisted driveshaft on a heavy truck: "Have a conversation with the driver about their driving habits."

I felt that the Haynes manuals had just enough stuff to be useful, without going overboard. But nowadays, web forums and YouTube are great.

My problem with webforums is that a lot of users used image hosts that no longer exist, or deleted anything too old unless the user upgraded (unlikely for anyone altruistic enough to write up a guide).

Then while youtube is great, if I hear "and to put it all back together, do everything I just said in reverse", I'm going to lose it.

Admittedly, it sometimes requires interpolating between a few different YouTube videos before things begin to make sense. There are also the ones to the effect of: "We're not going to do it right, we're going to do it this way instead."

In addition to car repairs, I've also found the web to be great for home appliances.

Yeah I fixed a dryer thanks to YouTube. And someone on Reddit diagnosed my dishwasher and I fixed it too. Thousand dollars saved right there.

Former dealer technician here, the Haynes books give most DIYers just enough rope to hang themselves. The wiring diagrams are never complete and a lot of info is missing outright. I guess it's good enough for a casual person looking to maintain their own vehicle, but it is far from comprehensive. It was always a red flag when I would spot a Haynes book in a car I pulled. Sure to be a cleanup job after someone got in too deep. Haynes' choice to stop printing books is just another example of the shift away from printed materials. In the automotive industry, information aggregators like Alldata, Motor, Mitchell stopped doing printed service manuals many years ago. They even discontinued DVD service manuals. (Finally)

What do you think are the most reliable/repairable cars? Can be from any era.

I love Toyota and Honda for long term reliability. I am a Nissan tech so its not a brand loyalty thing here. Toyota pickups and corolla are highly sought after on the secondary markets overseas in Asia and Africa because they will go 500k miles routinely.

> Toyota pickups and corolla are highly sought after on the secondary markets overseas in Asia and Africa because they will go 500k miles routinely.

Holy shit. What years? And thanks.

All years are good.

'Foreigners in Afghanistan have long joked that Afghanistan is where the world’s Corollas come to die. But Afghan’s take issue with that description.

“They come here to die?” asked a puzzled Askar Khan while leading reporters through dozens of parked Corollas in his dealership at the eastern edge of Kabul. “But Corollas never, never die. They drive on forever.”'

https://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/afghanistan-gives-a...

Appreciate your expertise, friend! Valuable for me in my hunt for a used pickup.

You can find various reliability stats online. Toyota usually comes up at, or very near, the top.

I'm trying to learn more about car maintenance. I can change oil, take the wheels on and off, check fluids. I even was able to test some faulty speed sensors on the wheels for a speedometer issue I was having.

What is considered going too far, to get into situations where technicians such as yourself smirk at DIYers? Right now I'm trying to diagnose a power steering leak and might have to replace the high pressure line. I'm going to try do it regardless, but I'm just curious as to what is considered "good for them for trying" vs. "dang it why did they try".

For me, I hated to see parts missing or damaged on assembly. Wiring repairs or accessory installs made with scotch-lok connectors or wire nuts.Using crappy eBay parts. Using an entire tube of RTV sealant where only a dab was necessary. Messing with refrigerant including (illegal) venting to atmosphere. The list goes on and on but it boils down to improper techniques and materials. I really can't fault anyone for trying to do it themselves. Most of the people who read HN can afford an auto repair bill so I think its more the "hacker" mindset that influences people here to attempt repairs themselves. Just be honest with the service department if you got in over your head. We won't snicker too much :-)

This is good to know, I usually stay away from what I can tell is a "lifehack" style repair on YouTube, and I try to buy real parts. And good to know about the mechanic, I have a good relationship with mine and now I know how to keep it that way!

EDIT: P.S. yes, I do fall into the "I can afford the mechanic bill" category, but it isn't so much hacker mindset as sustainability and self reliance mindset.

This is why I love car forums when people leak the full and complete wiring diagram and repair manual for the vehicle.

This is sad.

Haynes manuals are fantastic. It's hard to beat having one at hand when working on a vehicle, much more convenient than a tablet.

I briefly used the online subscription to make some minor repairs on a vehicle I was selling so didn't buy a paper manual as selling the vehicle. The UX wasn't great and also subscription vs owning a paper book isn't great.

I probably would've bought a Haynes manual for my ten year old car if youtube weren't so good at summoning videos showing me how to replace and repair various items.

Last one I bought was for the previous car (2000 model year).

Once upon a time my first stop before buying a particular car was to buy the Haynes manual and work through it (they are all essentially the same manual varied by car, taking you through the same procedures). If the car didn't look maintenance friendly then I'd let it go because I wasn't rich enough to pay for a garage.

The last decade I've had two modern cars and I absolutely hated them. Nothing - and really, I mean it - was user serviceable. Every little thing required a trip to the nearest dealership eating up half a day or more. Anything made after 1990 or so is so locked up that the 'right to repair' is mostly meaningless, yes, you have the right. But you don't have the $200K in special tools, besides the complexity and the number of sensors make it super hard to work on these anyway.

There are some pretty gifted people out there for who this is not a hindrance, but your average 'wrench' type of person is without a chance to work on anything but the most superficial parts of a modern vehicle.

Iunno, one thing I like about the internet is that you can type in vague engine codes (e.g. one indicating a vacuum leak, could be anything!), and a forum will already have determined that it's 99% this or that component based on experience.

A book printed and not updated once a car is a year old won't publish that. And definitely won't if it's an issue that tends to pop up after 5+ years of operation (e.g. intake manifold gasket destroys itself in '05 Corollas).

I had a 1997 Chrysler Concorde that seemed easy enough to work on. I would call it "barely ODB II".

I diagnosed the EGR valve being seized based on performance (overheating at idle) and didn't even think about trying to do the work on my own though (it had a fussy aluminum to cast iron gasket and I didn't want to spend $$ learning how to seat it for 1 repair).

End of an era (well, transition really). I still have a catalog of these in my workshop as a history of all the vehicles I've owned. I learned how cars worked from these manuals. The digital product will be nice but greasy fingerprints on well worn pages will always feel nostalgic to me.

Sad news, but the reality is that most modern cars are mostly not really repairable by the average owner. Even finding basic info about replacing something like a headlamp bulb is ... "not forthcoming".

Now if you'd like to see a real "solid state" vehicle get rebuilt, check out Geoffrey Croker's 1978 Series 3 Land Rover Restoration:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNR9e5gIAR0ep6TiEuqNJ...

I think there's even mention of the Haynes Manual in there.

I used to have an '87 Toyota 4x4 pickup that I did all the modifications and maintenance on. Easy vehicle to work on, extremely well-built. I'd go so far as to say it was ridiculously over built for a half-ton mini pickup.

I also have a Nissan 350Z. Step 1 in replacing a headlamp bulb is either "remove wheel" or "remove front bumper," I forget which, but they both have to come off in order to change a fricking light bulb!

Yeah, I have had the same experience on my current vehicle. Almost impossible to get to the headlight bulb compartment without removing the front wheel to get to the access panel.

It seems absurdly difficult as someone who didn't have a wrenching father, to learn how to wrench.

I learned how to change my oil, change a tire, and do ultra basic shit like change the engine oil filter and head/tail lights on my wifes 2014 ford fiesta. Outside of this, I'm SOL. Sure, I can youtube some of this - but not all of it.

I'd sometimes feel like I'd understand how cars work at some points after doing research and watching videos about my own car, and then I'll hear someone talk about a part I've never even heard of. I don't know where to even begin with learning the more fun parts of modding, or tuning. The fact that it's apperently impossible to get proper workshop manuals now makes it feel like this industry is as hostile to DIYers as it gets.

I don't know all the institutional knowledge to even begin with purchasing tools. Apparently I want to avoid harper-freight jack-stands (as the common meme goes) because they are very likely to fail and crush people. I'm concerned that not knowing enough about automotive memes may get myself killed one day. I don't know what I don't know and it scares me.

It's doubly bad because the automotive industry is especially full of frauds and cheats. They don't call them "stealerships" for nothing. Mechanics are extremely unsavory (even the "good" ones) and I do not feel comfortable letting other people do work on my vehicle. Anecdotal stories of work conditions within dealer repair shops give me further reasons to be uncomfortable.

There used to be a series of books called "How to keep your XXX alive" In my case the XXX was "Toyota Pickup." I don't know if there's something similar for newer cars, but that book basically assumed you knew NOTHING and taught it to you. Including stuff like "don't rely on hydraulics: use jackstands."

I'd advise finding one, even if it's for the wrong car, since a lot of the basic stuff is the same. I started with that, a Haynes manual, and then found the complete Factory Service Manual for sale somewhere.

BTW: I have a set of 25+ year-old Harbor Freight jackstands that are fine. The bad ones IIRC, are from a specific batch a few years ago.

A long time ago I realized that the main difference between professional mechanics and myself is that they had the experience to (usually?) get something right the first time and the knowledge to do some things faster. But there's nothing they know that I can't learn; it'll just take me longer.

The first time I needed to change a flat, I had to ask for help because I had absolutely no idea what to do. But I watched closely and learned.

This is a sad day. As mentioned by others on this thread, it used to be the thing to do - the day you bought a car (always secondhand in my case, I've never owned a new car or motorbike), you'd buy the Haynes manual, and look up the service schedule in it, and do it.

I changed my first car engine (unassisted) when I was 13. Vauxhall Viva that had thrown a big end. The Haynes manual told me everything I needed to do to change it, and I did it all myself - no parental or other adult help, other than arranging engine crane hire for me. It didn't run, but that was because the engine i'd bought was scrap, internally!

I've saved probably hundreds of thousands of pounds by fixing my own cars, and I've done pretty much everything possible on the cars I've owned since - complete engine rebuilds, gearbox rebuilds, everything. I still work on cars today as a sideline (mostly I teach music technology and produce music) - buying and selling cars that need work that people have shied away from as garages are generally pricey and often a rip-off.

If it wasn't for the skills that Haynes manuals helped me gain, I'd never have been able to afford to build and run a rally car (maintenance was a most-weekends job when I was doing say 6-8 events a year, and would have cost more than I earned in a year), and do a WRC event in it.

I emailed the guy at Haynes in charge of creating the manuals when I bought one that had next to no detail about gearbox rebuilds (when a previous edition of the same manual contained full details). Instead of the normal corporate reply, I got a passionate, heart-felt reply from a technical writer clearly aware of the demise of the home mechanic, the increasing complexity of modern vehicles and the pressures of print publishing - and this was around 20 years ago. He even sent me their gearbox rebuild manual (a more generic tome) which I still have, and have used several times.

Thanks Haynes. You've taught me more than any course I have been on, and saved me an absolute fortune.

I think forums also compete heavily with Haynes. A printed black and white work book isn't as good as pictures and somebody that has done it before to answer questions.

...and YouTube videos. Of course, neither will help if you have a relatively obscure vehicle and need to do a relatively obscure repair on.

Yeah, I'll never buy a car that isn't an 'enthusiast' car. You can get help on any procedure on any new/ancient BMW or Corolla out there.

Good luck if you have a Kia.

Where will we find the information to repair our F-16s?

https://amzn.com/0857333984

Or Saturn Vs?

https://amzn.com/0857338285

i will certainly pour one out for them.

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