For Every car I've owned, I bought shop manuals... How does one get them for the PIP ? Have any of you purchased them ? The guys in the parts dept where I bought my PIP said you can't get them, I find this so odd.... If they are only online or electronic, can I get a copy or access ?
They're not available yet but Helm sells them for 2011 and older, and some 2012 Prius books @ Helm Incorporated: Product Search Engine
The 2012 PiP repair manual is available from Toyota TechInfo (http://TechInfo.toyota.com) TOYOTA 2012 Library Contents You can pay for a one day subscription ($15 iirc) and view the repair manual. Last time I accessed TechInfo, the manual is displayed using Flash so it wasn't so easy to save the pages for later viewing (like a PDF for example). It is doable though, but very tedious. If you look at some older manuals, you'll see they are all PDFs. But all their new ones use someFlash viewer. Something else I noticed also is the manual will reference other parts of the manual. So, for example, if you are looking at removing the door, the manual will say refer to door panel removal section, then refer to electrical section, then refer to whatever.. Then to remove door, take out these two bolts. So when I got the service manual I wanted, I was almost forced to save the whole manual, rather than just the parts I thought I may need.
Assuming you saved parts of the manual, even though tedious, how did you do it? Some sort of screen capture program, with manually flipping thru each page, one by one ? Maybe this will be the first car I don't go out and by the manual... And just wait and see where (and if) any need arises, or wait for a 3rd party manual. Thanks for the info!
You can print the pages. So I just printed them to PDF (you can use Acrobat Pro or any number of freeware PDF creation programs). But yes, I went through almost every page. I skipped some stuff that I knew I would never ever need or want. But I'd say I got a good 90% of the whole manual. If I recall, when I printed to PDF, each page would save with the file name that was descriptive of what I was saving. However, I had to create the folders to hold all the pages and my folder structure followed the table of contents. I did all this when I thought I was going to get a CT200h.. so I have the 2011 CT and Prius service manuals, but not the 2012 PiP.. I dont recall exactly, but I want to say it took me about 3 hours to get everything I wanted (thats per car).. I think I'll wait to get the 2012 PiP service manual.. its more curiosity for me than anything else.. and maybe the wiring diagram. But for interior and body stuff, the older manuals are OK.
I had a Bently Manual on my 05 Prius that I thought was pretty good, eventually they should be coming out with a PIP Repair Manual.
