Re: Alfa shop manuals and reference materiel

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

On Fri, 20 Sep 2002 01:01:05 -0700 Jon Pike <jhpike@domain.elided> wrote:
> So,  how are the Car Disks?  (hope they have their XP fix for the one I 
> wanted,  by now!)  The official shop manuals? 

the car discs are effectively shop manuals + parts manuals. they are cds
full of images of the pages, with a table of contents and an ability to
select pages. they do not have any searchability (it would have taken a bit
of work to do this while retaining the general design of images, as someone
would have had to indexed by hand or else run OCR over each page.) in the
absence of actual physical posession of a shop manual or parts book, or
copy of same, the car disc is worth getting. note that the 164 car disc
lacks a parts manual.

the parts manuals can be pretty outstanding in terms of understanding what
the pieces in the car actually are.

when the shop manuals cover a procedure they usually do a good job of it.
the trick is getting the right shop manual. in the absence of a car disc,
it's catch as catch can at swap meets.

some of the alfa parts vendors sell photocopies of "official" shop manuals.
my wife has a gtv-6/milano manual she got from a vendor (whose name she has
forgotten) many years ago; it's very frustrating because it's incomplete,
lacking many important sections (it has the ABS supplement for the milano,
but not the original section on the brakes, for example.) i'd buy a car
disc before risking a potentially incomplete photocopy of the original.

the images on the car disc are pretty clean; you can use a good laser
printer to make your own copy of relevant sections of the original manual.
i'd call it fair use.

richard
--
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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