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I’ve always been curious about how many different manuals there seem to be for every car. I know that the manufacturers create one for dealers and that there are/were companies that tear cars down to make their own, but it feels like when I’ve needed to go find instructions for things there’s a staggering variety of manuals of varying levels of helpfulness.

Even when I manage to find what I think is an FSM it seems a little hard to follow what’s really going on in a given section without reading the section for every other assembly involved.

[dclowd9901]

You’re totally right about this. I’d say there’s a very wide range of quality between various manufacturers’ FSMs. Toyota ones are great with diagnostic instructions and explicit parameters to match, whereas other brands I’ve leafed through have completely muddy pictures and poor instructions or no figures.

For third parties, I find Bentley manuals to be extremely good and thorough.

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The car that I'm most interested in fixing something on at the moment is a Toyota, so that's great to hear about their manuals. If one finds a manual from the manufacturer itself is it safe to say that that's the true FSM versus something else they may have produced?

Thanks for the tip on the Bentley manuals, too!