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Haynes manual

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Wanderer:
Mmmm
Come to think about it....
No I've never been bit by a strawberry.
Nor have I ever managed to find any rocking horse droppings.

Ed

V8MoneyPit:
Just got my Haynes delivery and had a brief look at this book.

It is, as suggested, a series of LRO articles. It is nicely presented with good quality print. Most of the drives are based in the south with the most northerly being the Peak District and north Lincs.

As with the original articles, there are no specific route instructions. So this, rightly so, forces some homework to be able to plan your own route.

Rather worryingly, it mentions 'off-road' a little too often. Even the subtitle on the front cover is 'Where to go offroading in the UK'. Then the Forward mentions 'off-road drives' within the first 3 lines of text. Since when are byways 'off-road'?

It mentions all UCR's as all being drivable. Is this actually the case? I'm not so sure.

I've always found LRO to be rather contradictory when it comes to driving green lanes. I even wrote to them about a readers car picture that was completely covered in mud, I mean 'completely'. It was quoted as having just completed a green lane drive. For a magazine that suggests it is sensitive to these issues, why does it publish a picture of a car that has blatantly abused byway usage? Needless to say, my letter was never published.

Anyway, despite my concerns with the core publication, the book seems like a reasonable read.

Range Rover Blues:
In their defence, my first experience of a workshop manual was for the MkII Esoct and it's b****y good.  One of the few bits it doesn't takle is rebuilding a diff.  Now in the Ford workshop manual, that section is thicker than the chapter on engines, and the list of special tools covers 3 pages!

If only they'd separate Range Rovers into Carbs models and EFi, the supliment is now twice the size of the manual and I only ever read chapter 13.

V8MoneyPit:
I generally find Haynes publications very good. We sell several of their books. The old manuals can leave a little to be desired, but the new layout is much better. One thing they suffer from is the 'this is not a diy job, take the car to the garage' cop out. The early Mini manuals used to include a large section on the manual gearbox and leave the auto to the specialists (fair enough, I think). But in the new Mini issue, they have excluded manual gearbox rebuilding, using the 'not a diy job' phrase.

The old 2CV manual is simply wrong in many areas. If you followed their instruction on front swivel replacement you could actually cause damage to a suspension arm costing £150 to replace!

Their more general publications are normally very nicely printed and well presented. Usually can't fault them. My concerns with the LR Expeditions book lay with the LRO articles, not Haynes. But overall it is still a nice book and worth a read if you haven't got every issue of LRO.

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