If you make a motoring related list of “things that don’t happen anymore”, somewhere near the top of the list you can put people fixing their cars at home. Amateur car maintenance is a rarity these days, partly because modern cars are more reliable than they used to be but mainly because most people are more concerned about social death than the prospect of actual death.
Being spotted performing a level-check of your brake fluid must surely indicate you have fallen on hard times and can’t afford to visit a proper garage, and that’s how rumours start. As someone who is far from a real mechanic but always keen to learn new skills, I generally despair at such people who are not only useless, but proud of it. Back in happier times when fewer people were total morons, it was reasonably common to encounter a neighbour with their bonnet up, sometimes attempting quite ambitious jobs right there in the street. Whatever they were up to, it’s a fair bet they would have a particular publication to guide them through their task. I refer of course to the very Bible of home mechanics, the Haynes Workshop Manual. Imagine my disappointment to recently discover that Haynes Workshop Manuals will no longer be physically printed and published for new cars; we are truly witnessing the end of an era.
Haynes Manuals were once essential purchases for the cost conscious motorist. The books take their name from John Harold Haynes who wrote his first automotive volume in 1956, a guide to building an Austin 7 based special. He wrote two further books whilst performing his national service in the Royal Air Force, before founding Haynes & Co. Limited in 1960. It took until 1966 for his first repair and maintenance manual to hit the shelves of the motor factors, choosing the Austin-Healey Sprite as subject number one; there’s a good pub quiz question for you. Haynes Manuals were no-nonsense practical publications from the outset, comprehensively detailing repair, maintenance and servicing jobs. Haynes & Co really got into their stride in the 1970s and the range rapidly expanded to cover the majority of popular cars and motorcycles on the market. The front cover of each manual stated it was “based upon on a complete strip down and rebuild” and each job within was described with detailed instructions, illustrated by numerous diagrams and photographs. Of course, the practice of a complete strip down and rebuild of a nearly new example in Haynes’ own workshops all those years ago may not be directly comparable to battling your filthy and rusted example on your rain soaked driveway, so those photographs may have be taken with a pinch of salt.
Regardless, sales of 200 million individual manuals in 15 different languages prove they must have been doing something right. Haynes Publishing Group latterly expanded their range to cover lifestyle topics, domestic appliances and the human body, but the vehicle manuals have remained the backbone of the business. However, time has moved on and new owners Infopro Digital have taken the commercial decision to cease publishing any new printed workshop manuals. By going digital they aim to expand their range by a further 40%, without troubling the printing presses. The good news is that their extensive back catalogue will remain available in print form for now, but guides for new models will only be available in digital form.
Considering we’re not exactly big on new cars around here, that may seem like a non-story, but think of what the loss of printed manuals represents. There will be no more digging a manual off the garage shelf to find it has gone mouldy over winter. There will be no more peering at dog-eared copies with pages missing and oily fingerprints on those pages that remain. Pre-reading instructions under gloomy garage strip lights will be a mere memory. No more blood will drip from your skimmed knuckles onto the paper, and never again will you continue to smell the millilitre of gear oil that stubbornly infused the back cover ten years previously. It’s just not the same dripping blood onto the screen of a smartphone. Unfortunately, demand for printed manuals has declined in response to the rise of the internet, the very medium you are reading now. Deep down we all know that model-specific discussion forums and video sharing websites have been a god-send for guidance on those tricky little jobs, and the ability to ask other humans about specific intricacies whilst having access to high quality colour photographs and video is something that a mute manual cannot match. It’s still often easier to print the information you need so you can refer to whilst in the garage, but that’s still cheaper than buying a whole publication which may not even cover the job in question. All that may be a given, but a printed workshop manual still feels more “proper” somehow…
Half the fun of the printed workshop manual is knowing how to read it. Home mechanics quickly learned that advice such as “should remove easily” or “this is a tight fit” were portents of trouble ahead, but only bitter experience could lead you to truly understand the health and safety nightmares which invariably followed advice to “carefully pry” and “gently ease” the component in question. We’ve all got flat blade screwdrivers that bear the tell-tale evidence of things rarely being as simple as implied. The tension really mounts up when you read “alternatively, you can fabricate your own special tool as follows”. At some point long after the manuals for our cars were originally written, Haynes started grading jobs by spanner rating between one to five to indicate how much of a pickle you were about to get yourself into. Anyone should be able to manage jobs graded at a single spanner, and two to three spanner jobs only really require basic skills. However, when dealing a quartet or quintet of spanners matters can vary alarmingly between “slightly tricky” and “car is about to be irretrievably immobile for months”. Part of the fun is deciding at which point to bail out. Regardless of spanner rating, nowhere does the manual assume your Phillips screw heads will be slacker than a clown’s pocket, nor will it predict that a vital bolt head has been smoothed round and shears with the ease of butter (i.e. every bolt head ever). This isn’t the fault of the manual, it’s invariably the fault of the last monkey to touch that fitting, which may well turn out to have been you.
Still, there is something that draws me to Haynes manuals, the allure of knowledge to be gained, even if I know the section on rebuilding a gearbox is only to be read in the same way that a dog observes the outside world passing his window; seeing is not always the same as understanding. If all else fails I can always look at the pictures and this is where Haynes holds a trump card over its competitors, starting right there on the front cover. I have retained manuals for cars I have long since sold, and acquired manuals for cars that I have never owned and possibly never will, all on the strength of the artwork. The cutaway drawings of the subject matter are a very particular form of automotive art, invariably drawn by and bearing the name of master technical illustrator, Terry Davey. Born in 1933, Terry had a largely self-taught ability to don x-ray eyes to look inside opaque machinery and translate his vision into detailed technical drawings of what lay beneath. After training at Westland Aircraft before working as a display manager for a supermarket chain, he moved to Haynes in 1972 just in time for a large expansion of the business. He immersed himself in his role, making detailed records of each strip down and hungrily consuming manufacturer technical data. At the peak he was joined by four other illustrators but Davey’s style set the template up to and beyond his retirement in 1991. His front three quarter cutaway drawings remain instantly recognisable, and it’s all the more remarkable that he produced work of such quality, drawn freehand on a traditional upright drawing board. There were no templates to work from, no CAD, no tracings. There were certainly cheaper ways for Haynes to illustrate their front covers, but competitor manuals look frankly low-rent by comparison. I could say that as a child I was fascinated by the details within Terry Davey’s artwork, but that would be to overlook the fact that I remain so.
With 200 million individual books already sold and the Haynes back catalogue remaining available, there’s no danger of a worldwide shortage for a while yet, but it’s sad that no new subjects will make it into physical print. The decision of Infopro to go digital shouldn’t be a surprise though, given the decline in home servicing of cars and the increasing difficulty of doing so, coupled with the technical information being freely available from other sources. But Haynes manuals remain something to celebrate, a British success story which gained fame around the world and defined their category. Us home bodgers may have a love-hate relationship with Haynes Workshop Manuals, but there is something comforting about their presence. Now then, Step 1. Undo and withdraw securing bolt…