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 ow

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.