Haynes manuals for our bikes

[Trigger]

My two pennyworth......Haynes Manuals do serve a purpose, but I have to say that they often (more often than not) fail to tell the full story, so you are left scratching your head on whether to turn left, turn right or stand still when you reach a task which is on the critical path with rebuilding anything mechanical....brakes, engine, gearbox etc etc. Probably why so many bits are broken or engines fail to work properly despite many hours of painstaking hard work going into them !

Surely it's not too difficult for the Haynes Author to diligently read through their words when it's finished and make a simple judgement 'Does that make sense and will my readers understand what I have written' ? We all go through an Education System where somebody more knowledgeable than ourselves reviews what we have written and corrects mistakes or clarifies misunderstandings, so why shouldn't the Publishers of Haynes Manuals do exactly the same before they release their books......on their 'unsuspecting' Customers ?

I pestered Nurse Julie to have a go at writing such Manuals/ DVD's after following her recent Engine Rebuild thread on the sohc Forum.....her thread was logical, clear, to the point and easy to follow. Whilst her photos were much clearer than the crap that Haynes use, they were actually photos of the parts being assembled - not something completely different or just showing one gear of a five gear cluster when talking about assembling the complete five gear cluster and all it's associated bits !

As my old Teachers regularly used to say to me 'Must try harder' !

What do Teachers know! I remember my old dad telling me of a Teacher throwing a black board rubber at him and shouting out " pay attention as, you will never get a job looking out of the window ".

Strange when you think, he was a truck driver for 40 years 

[MrDavo]

That reminds me of some graffiti I saw in Rochdale
‘When I pass away I want to go quietly in my sleep like my father.
Not screaming in terror like his passengers.’

Mr Davo i am supprised you got 1.5 gears on the 5 speed triumph aas i remember it telling you to fit the hi gear sleeve gear first(one the sprocket goes on) then fit the cam plate and that is physicaly impossible

I think I left them in because I was baffled by that step, I think, I was doing an emergency crank change, like you do when you have a Triumph. I did it in a week, because it was my only transport.
The 1.5 gears was caused by the selector arm being misstimed when the inner cover was assembled as shown in the photo. I only found out when I tried to go for a ride, how I laughed!
Luckily the engine didn’t have to come out again, just the inner and outer gearbox covers. I’m not sure how I worked out the problem, of course there was no internet in those days, we thought Ceefax was cutting edge technology.

[Bryanj]

Week for a crank swop, you were hanging about, i replaced mains in an afternoon, admittedley a pre unit but you still had to remove engine and box

[MrDavo]

I did have the minor inconvenience of having to go to work during the day in the meantime. I noticed a bad knock on a Sunday afternoon, and found I could move the drive end of the crank up and down quite a long way. Luckily I had another T140V engine, which I'd bought from two lads who'd spotted it under the water in the Huddersfield Canal. The exhaust cam was seized in a bush, which was turning in the crankcase - I reckoned it had come from a bike which had been broken up (having started to make horrible noises) and dumped as an insurance job. Apart from being full of oily water, it seemed none the worse for it's early bath.

Working on the bike in the weekday evenings I put it back together on a Good Friday, which I had off, but after the gearbox shenanegans we finally set off for a bike club do in Portmaddoc late afternoon, and got there just as the club van was leaving for the pub.

I've seen pre-unit mains changed over the lunch break at a classic race meeting, I think they left the top end intact and the pistons in the barrels.