One for Sweller

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2428810283&category=9945

 

Thanks, but I already have one (and for TS, TS/1 and ETZ) in better
condition too, and also for the ES the very nice hardback factory
workshop manual. It's almost a work of art.

Quick scan to illustrate point..
http://www.sweller.co.uk/sob/es-man.htm

Still stuck a bid in, but I suspect it may go above...

 

It is indeed.

 

Wow. No, that was -not- sarcasm, that was a wow. Is the whole manual as
well illustrated as that?. Makes Haynes look even sicker.

 

On the whole, yes.

Each page will have about 3 good quality black and white photographs to
illustrate the paragraph. Like this:
http://www.sweller.co.uk/sob/images/bw.jpg (12kb)

There are nice schematics regularly (like the carb cut-away) and this one
for the wiring (it's a fold out section too big for my scanner):
http://www.sweller.co.uk/sob/images/es-schem.jpg (111 kb)

plenty of engineering drawings to illustrate points (this is from the ETZ
manual):
http://www.mztech.fsnet.co.uk/images/pump.gif (31 kb)

and of the special tools that can be fabricated:
http://www.mztech.fsnet.co.uk/images/clutchrem.jpg (31 kb)

My scanner's quality isn't that great, but you get the idea.

 

Sorry, couldn't snip that lot. The schematic for the wiring and the diagram
of the clutch tool are superb.

There is a lovely 'style' about eastern bloc manuals, as owners of Praktica
cameras and older Meopta enlargers will know. That wiring schematic style
probably couldn't be carried over to more modern machinery, but that is so
easy to follow compared to the diagrams one is usually presented with. I
love the way the it has been done.

Ladybird books used to do 'how it works' type books that were laid out in a
similar fashion with major components represented as they actually look.

Fantastic stuff!

 

Fantastic stuff! Those manuals look like a dream come true for committed
spanner jugglers.

Almost makes me want an MZ

I always struggle with just how crap things like Haynes manuals are. Photos
of details that tell you nothing, drawings badly transposed and re-labelled
from a manufacturers publication, ambiguous and irrelevant cross references
from one model to another and cop outs that save having to write a
description properly. The one I have for the Triumph pre-unit twins is
atrocious. Thank God for the reprint of the official workshop manual from
JR Technical!

In fact I've had a Haynes for just about every vehicle I've ever owned over
the last 35 years and they've all been as bad. I guess they're so
successful because knob-heads like me keep falling for it.

Maybe I ought to find myself an MZ manual - just to start the juices flowing
eh?

 

Bloody hellfire, that's smart.

You haven't got one for my 150, have you? I'd pay a decent price.

 

I would differ there. Yes, the current Haynes manuals are rubbish, but
it was not always so. Back when, I had a 70s Haynes for the Mini that
was about 200 pages thick and covered in exhaustive detail every
single thing you could ever want to know about every item on/in the
car. It covered the earliest to the latest (at time of writing) and
even showed how to recondition a dynamo if you needed.

I think it was probably the last time they produced a manual worth
reading for its own sake.

--

Dave

GS 850 x2 / SE 6a
SbS#6? DIAABTCOD#16 APOSTLE#16? FUB#3
FUB KotL OSOS#12? UKRMMA#19

 

there was a bit in the owner's manual for an ETZ125 that a friend had from
new about possible causes for the bike not to start; one such was "shortage
of volts in the electrical system".

 

The original Yamaha RD350LC manual had a warning telling you not to
drink the battery acid, followed by a recipe covering an entire page,
for the concoction you had to knock together as an antidote. Lots of
milk, IIRC.

And the Jawa owner's manual told you to decoke the exhaust baffles by
taking them to waste ground, dousing them in petrol, and igniting
them.

My favourite was the manual for my old YB100, which had a chapter of
the "gear shift and gear shifting" and omitted the letter "f"
throughout.

 

I have Haynes for bikes and cars, and, I guess I must be rapidly hitting
middle age.

Oh, they don't make 'em like they used to.

Comparing the haynes for my old z400 and gsx400 with the one for my xj650
shows a small decline in standards, but the xj one is still good. Not a
patch on the factory manual where they seem to pinch wholesale from whilst
utterly missing the point.

The -worst- bike Haynes I have is for the gsx600f. Utterly utterly abysmal.
Haynes have tried, and failed, to combine a whole plethora of oil cooled
gsx bikes. The end result is a horribly confusing mishmash that I find
difficult to work from.

The genuine Suzuki manual isn't too shonky though. Best manufacturers
service manual I've kept for an unreasonable amount of time though is the
Kawasaki ke125. Close in quality and clarity of illustration to the mz
items, similar pidgin english used in places, but I managed a complete
strip down and rebuild of the engine post traumatic seizure due to the oil
feed line cracking whilst thrashing it on a dual carriage way without once
cursing the manual.

That, I feel, is the sign of a well put together service book.

I've never owned a Clymer manual. Borrowed one and found it OK, and I will
probably buy the clymer for the gtr when it gets published next January.

 

I have a Clymer for the Boxer. It's a paperback, around 1.5" thick
(really), and it's great. On rare occasions it's been more accurate than
the parts system (the software that used to be microfiche) in my local
BMW agent.

I also have the Haynes - half the thickness, 25% of the usefulness. For
example Haynes only have a singel exploded diagram of the carbs, whereas
Clymer have about 4 pages on how to service them. Mindyew, neither had
the exact same carbs illustrated as my machine, but I suspect there are
just too many variants.

Clymer also has tantalizing comments occasionally, for example what to
do to get a particularly stubborn bit undone. I wish there were more -
I'm getting used to Sherlocks saying 'Oh, you mean that bit that always
seizes/bends/snaps/wears out...'

C'est la guerre...

Regards,

Simonm.

 

Thus spake Sean unto the assembled multitudes:

I had a Clymer manual for a 1973 Triumph Tiger 650 (TR6R) as a backup for
the pretty hopeless Haynes manual, but the bike semed to be such a mishmash
of factory leftovers that neither manual quite covered everything, and
seemed to refer to different bikes half the time. The Clymer manual was
much easier to follow though, and got a lot more use and oily fingerprints
over the 4 years I had the bike.

 

The current ones aren't all rubbish. I have the workshop manual and
the BoL for the Hinckley Triumphs (carb, not EFI), and I generally use
the BoL rather than the factory book.

 

The worst I have is for the Bonnie. It would be OK for a pre-oif
Bonnie, but Haynes failed to recognise that the pre-oif to oif changes
were probably greater than the pre-unit to unit changes and just stuck
extra bits about the T140V/E/D on the back of the T120 book. I do now
actually have a genuine Triumph workshop manual for it, but they're
not as good as the best-written of the BoLs.