If you were going to buy a manual for your civic...would you spend your money on a factory shop manual or a Haynes or Chiltons?
If any of you have all three,which one is the must have?

 

The FSM's are available for download online; at some point when I have the time/motivation I'll be breaking the downloaded FSM into a million separate documents and creating an html page that links to whatever job description I'm looking for. Searching the complete pdf for something specific can be onerous at times.

Haynes/Chiltons are good for quick reference, but are lacking in the details, and don't cover everything, sometimes are just plain wrong.

I find myself referring to both the Haynes, and the FSM for most jobs. Haynes first to get an idea of what's involved, FSM when it comes time to actually do it.

 

Thanks for the reply. I downloaded a shop manual but it is rather laborious to look through and would cost as much to print it out as to buy a new one.

 

What I have done for the available PDF manuals is to convert them to searchable text using Adobe Acrobat. Some but not all have undergone this conversion. This way you can find most everything relatively quickly.

 

Good idea, hadn't thought of that. I've got Acrobat on my work pc. Does it rely on the OCR function? Never had great luck with that.

 

It has always captured most of the text for me.

Go to:

Document>Recognize Text Using OCR>Start

Select "All Pages" and then
Primary OCR Language: English (US)
PDF Output Style: Searchable Image (Exact)
Downsample: Lowest (600 dpi)

Click "Okay"

 

Worked like a charm; I just had to find a non password protected version of the manual first. I've bookmarked each section start page to make for easier browsing.

 

Yeah, I've bookmarked the daylights out on my PDF manuals, including most subsections. This gives you quick access to the most relevant information. When I can't locate something with bookmarks, I then resort to the search function in Acrobat Reader.