WallyP

If you want to repair or maintain your won 928, this forum, and the email lists, can help a great deal - BUT:

You MUST buy the Workshop Manuals.

It simply is not practical to try to maintain a 928 without access to the Workshop Manuals.

While these manuals seem awfully expensive at about $350 plus shipping, there is an old cliche that is appropriate: "If you think that education is expensive, wait until you try ignorance."

Using the manuals will allow you to repair and maintain your 928 much more efficiently and effectively. You can save enough to pay for the manuals the first time that you avoid a trip to a shop.

If you decide to sell your 928, the manuals make an excellent "deal sweetener and closer" to give a prospective buyer that final nudge. Or, you can sell them on eBay and get most of you money back - and sometimes more.

There are a lot of people who will try to help you - but a two paragraph message will never replace a twenty-page section from the manuals!

You can get the manuals on microfiche for a lot less money (about $35 plus shipping). This format is much less convenient - you have to hunt for a microfiche reader ($25 - $100 on eBay), or you have to go to your local library to read/print the info. The wiring diagrams are almost impossible to use in the fiche.

But the microfiche is better than nothing!

Bottom line - if you want to repair or maintain your own 928, buy the manuals.

Jay Wellwood

Absolutely!

Well said Wally.

Jerry 87 928S4

The only thing better is having a friend who is a certified Porsche Technician who has the Repair Books and the extra Mechanic books

Greg86andahalf

Agreed. I have the paper manuals and the CD. The nice thing about the web forums and email lists is the ability of other owners / mechanics to relate their expeiences relating to troubleshooting and problem resolution.

Without a manual as reference, how would someone even properly torque a bolt or nut? This "ain't" your fathers oldsmobile.

The photos are priceless and information good.

My issue with the manauls is that they cover so many model years, that often, you have to hunt for which info and photos are applicable to your model year car. A better photo captioning system would help. Also, finding electrical components is not always easy. Sometimes it pays to post the problem and use the info received on the forum, along with the manual to streamline the troubleshooting / component finding and R/R procedure. BTDT goes a long way.

Thanks is in order for all who post replies and assist in problem solving. I'm sure it is frustrating at times.

Randy V

Very good Wally. Perhaps you could post this under the thread "Attention New 928 Owners".

John Struthers

Wally,
You are preaching to the choir!
Talk to your people about selling the manuals sets piecemeal. Seriously, I'll bet there are any number of guy's out there -like me- who have wives and and kids that are black holes when it comes to ready cash. My 928 Trust Fund is going to get plundered again as all of my console switches are heading south as we speak. I'm remodling the house, I've been reappraised, up of course. I have two college funds, some small monthly investments, and two kids who will be driving in two to four years. Insurance... The Horror... and Pattycakes wants new shoes. Yeah, I know if you can't afford the Maintenance don't ...blah, blah, blah...
I am slowly hammering my way thru the poor man's book (CD) emphasis on slowly. I am actually indexing small summaries in a dedicated CD binder for Quick(?) reference. We would all love the books but some of us are financially ...lame.
I do agree with you though, if you have the bucks, buy the books! If you have two or more sHARKs and no books don't cry when Randy burns you. As for me, when it gets dark I have to sneak out to the back yard with a shovel and bury the $80.00 I won on the basketball pool.
Later, John Poormouth Struthers & Pattycakes
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Nicole

John's idea is a good one, as some people won't touch the engine, and others won't bother with the electrics. But then 928 Specialists might end up with lots of left over binders for one particular area of maintenance. Not good business for them...

Since I crossed the $8000 barrier in repairs on my car (in two years), I decided to learn more about maintaining and fixing it myself. There will always be things to leave up to a mechanic, though (rule of thumb: When it gets greasy...).

I have the manuals, and as a not so technical person I must say I regularly get lost in them. I have mainly tried to find stuff in the body/interior sections, and recently in the AC section. Often, what I'm looking for isn't in there, or it is described for a different model or year. Sometimes crucial steps are not pictured or missing completely in the description. Occasionally I had problems even locating the items described. So, you still need some phantasy...

Yet, the manual was a good investment, and paid for iteslf by now. Seeing the parts with your own eyes also helps. And Greg Nichols' website covers the rest in plain English.

Flint

I simply don't see why Porsche or whoever produces the books doesn't just make an official CD version. Or, a version you could download onto a handheld--in case you have that (heaven forbid) breakdown on a road trip and the only repair shop available has never seen "one o' them thar Germain carz." It seems in this day and age when the majority of big and little companies are moving toward paperless offices that there are thousands of little consulting firms who could make short work of that 9-volume set in a way that would be easy to use.

A man can dream, can't he? And no, not in the "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" way, unless, of course, there is a Porsche AG exec reading this, heh heh...&lt;sigh&gt;

Nicole

Flint:

It is more profitable for Porsche to sell you the paper manual, than an electronic format that you can easily copy and give to all your friends. I would not expect Porsche to even bother digitizing this ole manual for the fogotton model (looking at the page layout, I suspect it was created with a typewriter, rather than a computer).

A third party can only digitize and sell this with Porsche's permission (copyright), which might require heavy licensing fees. Someone on Ebay has offered a CD-ROM backup as a service, but they might be in violation of copyrights - maybe that's why I haven't seen this offer in a while...

Mike Schmidt

I'd think it would be even more profitable for Porsche to not sell you any manuals, and have you go to the dealership service department for repairs. As I understand it, the only reason the service manuals are available from Porsche is because it's required by law in the United States. In many or most other countries, the Porsche manuals are only available to the service departments of the dealerships.

dr bob

Nicole wrote:

[quote] A third party can only digitize and sell this with Porsche's permission (copyright), which might require heavy licensing fees. Someone on Ebay has offered a CD-ROM backup as a service, but they might be in violation of copyrights - maybe that's why I haven't seen this offer in a while... <hr></blockquote>

In my sometimes less-than-perfect opinion, I suspect that the "CD-ROM Backup" idea would get shot up fairly quickly if the factory-backed attorneys put their collective mind to it.

I had a chance to "review" a copy of a CD made from the microfiche, and I have to say that it's barely better than nothing, at least as far as the quality of the reproduction is concerned. That said, it is better than nothing, and may be enough better/more convenient than a fiche reader to make it something to consider, assuming that the legal stuff is OK.

For grins, I took a few pages of the paper manual and ran them through the scanner, OCR'd them, proofread them, indexed the text, pasted the picture images back in, and ported the output through Acrobat to get a searchable PDF as an end product. The amount of time needed to get these few pages done makes a whole manual project look pretty unattractive right now. After all, I do already have the manuals so why do I need the electronic version?

To take the exercise even more toward the absurd, the electrical pages for the climate control and the sound system on my '89 have been converted to Autocad. No comparison with the originals as far as readability and overall quality. Plus I fixed the errors that were in the stereo diagrams.
It takes the best part of a morning to get even a half-decent schematic done like this. Let's see, time is billing an X dollars per hour, which works out to about N dollars per minute... I can buy the book set new for less than the value of the time for one wiring diagram.

At some point, a group like the Owners Club will figure a way to get all the critical stuff into a manual format, without infringing on any copyright that Porsche might want to defend. To make that happen, a lot of folks will spend a lot of collective time just assembling the text and pictures. Editing for content and for consistent style will take a while longer, keeping in mind that plagiarism doesn't require very many copied words and phrases before you are over the line. Then when all is done, a few copies will be sold and the rest "shared" among friends. Wonder why PCNA hasn't gone through the trouble?


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