Service Repair Manuals on eBay Gen III

If you are interested in what is involved in a repair it might be a good buy. If you do not care at all I would not buy it. What do you do for a living?

I am an Electrical Eng. For only $10 I had to buy it.

 

For under $10 it's not a weighty decision. I've bought shop manuals for just about every car we've had over the years. Typically the paper manual is under $100, say around $70~$90. Even if you just do oil and transmission fluid changes, it pays for itself. You get precise instruction, torque values, and so on.

It's not indespenable, but still very helpful for brake inspection and/or pad/shoe replacement. If you set your own valve clearance it's close to indespensable. FWIW, I've read at least once that 2010 Prius uses hydraulic pressure for valve clearance, ie: it's not necessary to adjust.

If you want to pull some trim pieces off, it can be helpful to explain the fasteners, maybe save you breaking something hidden. Or not, sometimes it glosses over info.

OTOH, these books seems to be getting a lot more esoteric over the years: increased use of acronyms to the point of being unintelligible (Honda in particular), more and more dependence on specialized electronic tools beyond the scope and expense of a DIY'r.

Even if you never touch your car, if you can afford it it's an interesting read, if only to appreciate what the pros are doing

 

I am no engineer.

I care if something happens to my car, enough to go on this forum and research it/ask questions. But I feel the information here would render the book superfluous for a guy like myself. I'd look through it and be like "uh huh, uh huh, well nothing I can do about that." My main problem is lack of tools and nobody to show me how to do car-related stuff. Which is a pretty big problem.

It's nice to know a lot of you will have that book though...hehehe.

 

Excellent point. Thanks, I might get it after all. What's the link for the 04-09 Prius?

 

This I think:

Toyota Prius Service Repair Manual 2004 05 06 07 08 09 on eBay.ca (item 200553016920 end time 08-Jan-11 07:53:14 EST)

One advantage of the paper manuals: they're an excellent sleep aid.

 

I ordered the $9.95 (£6.55 GBP) 2010 manual last night and received it today (US/UK time difference), digital download is available in RAR format. The seller also sent me a link to get WinRAR to unzip it. The zipped file is 100MB.

 

I find a real PDF version is worth the money over a generic CD. I found a downloadable one for $12.99 here:

Toyota Prius 2010 Service Repair Manual - Download Technical

It also came with a separate electrical wiring diagram PDF.

 

I ordered the copy from eBay a week or so ago. So far, there has been no word from the seller. I am beginning to smell a scam here. But at least it was only $10, and I paid with Paypal so maybe I can get a refund. I will give it a few more days to see if anything shows up.

One of the previous comments asked why an ordinary person would want such a thing. I don't really plan to do anything major to my Prius, but I just like to know how things work. I have always tinkered with things, mostly electronic gadgets. Since the Prius, as well as most cars nowadays, seem to be computers on wheels, I would just like to know more about how they operate. Think of it this way, I have taken many A&P, Biology, Chemistry, etc. courses in college just because I was curious about how the human body works, but that does not mean I am willing to perform surgery (I am squeemish when it comes to blood and guts).

UPDATE...

Looks like I spoke a bit too soon. I got an email from eBay saying my order had shipped. I assume it will be coming by snail-mail so it could still be a week or more.

'nother Update....

I contacted the seller for a link and I just received the disk. One of the PDFs is over 7500 pages. The only drawbacks I see are that on some of the pages, the words and images are cut in half, with half on each page, and it would be a little difficult to find some things, but at least you can search through the PDF. I am not sure how up to date it is; I am sure some things have been updated. I can only assume it is all there. But for $10, I can't complain too much.

Now, to find a friend with a fast laser printer, and plenty of paper, and plenty of toner, and not too many questions.....

 

The CD I bought on ebay has the same files as your download except I didn't have to download them or burn them to a CD and they are few months newer. I didn't get the $10 CD.

 

Hi Mendel Leisk,
I am in Toronto Canada and will like to order one too.
I am wondering if you got yours yet and would you recommend it?
Thanks.

 

The above finally arrived two days ago. Worth the wait.

 

I would go the suggestion in post #27, that worked for me. It's direct download, around $9, a bit over 200 megs to download, and worked fine. It's a PDF document, about 8000 pages.

You put in your credit card info, and in turn get an email with a link. Not sure how necessary that email is, because I believe I was immediately redirected from the pay site to the download page. You might get a pop-up alert at top-of-page, asking if you want to accept downloads from this site, it all works

My other orders, discs to be mailed: neither have panned out so far, though a lot of people report they do get the $9 one, just takes a while. But direct download is definetely easier!

 

I downloaded the $9.95 Ebay one, the seller offers digital download. Same 8000 pages 200Mb, but compressed into RAR format so quite quick to download.

 

Well, the $9 CD mailer option (one of the OP's links) finally came. To be fair it was postmarked Dec 22, so just very slow in transit. It is identical content to the download I purchased: same files, identical size, identical creation dates.

 

I didn't see a download link (I could have overlooked it). Do you have to contact to seller for that?

 

$9.95 "eBay version" worked for me... blame slow shipping on USPS, plus it is holiday time, after all....

 

To all who either got the DVD or used the download: I'm curious if there is enough detail that shows how to extract the upper dashboard panel? There have been so many complaints here about rattles under the dash that I wondered if your pdf or DVDs explain how to remove it? Or would this be a dealer function requiring all kinds of special tools? (sometimes service manuals make reference to exotic tools the average person would not have handy)

Thanks in advance if you could check this and enlighten us. If it looks doable, I would go the instant download route rather than wait for a DVD in the mail.

 

Yes, I asked before purchase if it was an option and he said to contact him after purchase and he gave me the instructions.

 

I covers removing every part of the car including the dash.

 

I purchased manual from Tradebit System (#27 of this thread). Paid by paypal, immediate download link delivery. There are 2 manuals - electrical wiring and Repair ones. New car features manual is missing.
PDFs look to be complete, if I can compare with Techdoc downloaded in the past. Reference links are a just a dummy elements, so no navigation inside the document -> the PDF search function should be used as some assembly/disassembly operations are common and they described detaily just once.