Motoring
End of an era for driveway DIY bibles By Miranda Robertson newsdesk@blackmorevale.net
In the 25 years my husband and I have been together, we must have owned well over 100 cars. I totted them up about 10 years ago and reached 70 and age has not dimmed my little grease monkey’s passion for chopping and changing motors. This drives my dad up the wall, him being the type of
GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNIN’: John Haynes with one of his many manuals and inset, in his RAF uniform
of YouTube videos out there, the Haynes manual is still the bible. It feels odd there won’t be any more. However with vehicles getting ever more complex the company, which was bought in 2019 following founder John Haynes’ death, FONDANT MEMORY: Miranda’s has taken the reluctant wedding cake decision to stop producing new printed guides for chap who cannot be doing driveway enthusiasts. with change for change’s You’ll still be able to order a sake. manual for anything built But husband loves messing pre-2020 and newer guides about under the will be bonnet. He’s rebuilt published engines, changed online, but it is more ball joints the beginning of and drop links than the end for I could count and those wellreplaced a zillion thumbed turbos, aided by a handbooks, trusty Haynes often to be manual. Our found with wedding cake even black, oily featured a classic marks around car bought from the SPECIAL DELIVERY: the turbo chapter John Haynes’ first Haynes Motor in our house. ever manual Museum, with a The first Haynes fondant me sitting Workshop looking brassed off while a Manual was published in fondant, be-kilted Pete could 1965, aimed at owners of the be seen lying underneath the Austin Healey Sprite. It was an instant hit, and chassis. Haynes has since published So the news that Haynes, more than 200 million based at Sparkford, will no longer be publishing any new manuals on 300 cars. The amazingly detailed cutaway printed guides feels like the drawings by Terry Davey end of an era – if you’ll were featured from 1972. excuse the pun, a real Haynes has also printed wrench. Despite the enormous number books on 130 motorbikes and 68
you can even pick up manuals on vehicles from literature and films, such as the Doc’s DeLorean time machine from Back to The Future. Other manuals cover caring for a baby, a Bluffer’s
booklet about the project, drawing all the illustrations himself. The 250 copies he produced on a stencil duplicator sold out in 10 days at five shillings a pop. Later, he helped to fix an Austin Healey Sprite while doing his National Service in the RAF and realised the official manual wasn’t a lot of use to the layman. He founded the company in 1960, but it wasn’t until 1965 that first Sprite manual was produced. No wonder – it took time to perfect the format of the pistonheads’ ‘bible’. These days Haynes manuals are written by two authors and take between 20 and 30
MANUAL TRANSMISSION: The Haynes publishing HQ
Guide to Brexit, and pocket manuals for kids for anything from sharks to dinosaurs. The company is now creating an ‘exciting and comprehensive new automotive maintenance and repair product that will cover around 95 per cent of car makes and models – an increase of around 40 per cent over our current Workshop Manual coverage.’ Haynes re-built an old Austin 7 into a new special while still at school in 1956, having persuaded his headmaster to allow him to miss his rugby lessons so that he could rebuild his £15 saloon. The 17-year-old sold the finished car at a profit and wrote a
man-weeks. A car or motorcycle is bought at the beginning of the project and sold at the end. The vehicle is usually retained for a couple of months to ensure it is functioning correctly after the rebuild. The beauty of the guides is that they show people how to strip a car completely and reassemble it – and people loved them from the outset. The first run of 3,000 copies sold out in less than three months. By the time he launched the Haynes International Motor Museum in 1985 Haynes had sold millions of the guides and branched out into a number of sideline series
