Hi Just purchased my Gen 3..... Does anyone know where I can get a service manual that will not break the bank? Thanks
FYI, Toyota calls it "Repair Manual". You should be able to find it. When I went looking, I got burnt once, finally found one that allowed direct download, and belatedly got a dvd version (the same) in the mail from another attempt. They're typically around $10~20. Coming from a history of purchasing kosher paper Honda Shop Manuals, I'm really underwhelmed by the Toyota "book", it's a cryptic, unfriendly mess. But some useful info. It's more-or-less impossible to purchase a legal paper version: it's four volumes, and each around $250, just nuts.
The official channel is techinfo.toyota.com, $15 gets you in for two days (or all weekend, I'm told, if you start Friday), with all of the manuals, technical service bulletins, recall campaigns, etc., there to download. Depending on the year of the car, downloading can be more or less of a chore; in the early years they split the manuals up into a whole lot of tiny PDFs. I think as broadband has become more common, they've moved away from the tiny-cornflakes model so the downloading is easier. I'm told that the most recent pubs are in CHM format, a big file that's all nicely crossreferenced and hyperlinked, if you have software that displays CHM. (If you use Windows, your help system already can display CHM, on other systems, there are various viewers for it, see wikipedia.) My experience with the Toyota manuals could not be more different from Mendel's. I've worked with factory shop manuals from (at least) Mazda, Ford, Honda, Volvo, and Toyota. They all sort of have different personalities, but I have found them all very useful. Ford's old books were quite prosy and chatty, like sitting down with your mechanic uncle who was going to tell you why you do it this way. Mazda, more a parade of black-and-white line drawings down the page with a few words next to each one. Toyota, pretty much in the soft creamy middle. It's important to study the sections at the front that explain how the manuals are divided and organized, because you'll be using that knowledge all the time to decide where to look for what information. Really broadly, the diagnostics volume(s) will have instructions on troubleshooting, interpreting codes, what tests you can do to narrow down the possibilities. If you actually have to take something apart and put it back together, the later volumes have those steps. The electric volume is the most useful I've seen from anybody, with separate sections for diagrams in schematic form, or following the physical layout of the car, or showing all the junction box locations and pinouts, even all of the connectors by shape, color, pin pattern, and part number. All those sections are crossreferenced so you can jump in wherever you need to and find whatever you're looking for. There is one really important member of the manual family that you don't want to leave undownloaded. It's called the New Car Features Manual, and that's the one with all of the wrenchy-uncle stuff explaining how everything in your car works. You want that one, because the other manuals do pretty much assume you've been there already, -Chap
Thanks Chap..... I have some time off coming up so I think I will try the 2 day subscription and down load the PDF's
There was a thread that had a free one from the Italian Prius forum but I have rebuilt all my computers and lost the site and the manuals/maybe. Anyway I always take it to the dealer and negotiate what actually needs fixed. Too old to do this stuff anymore.