I recently purchased the complete set of Austin Healey manuals (parts, workshop, owners manual) on CD from the Heritage Motor Centre in England and thought I would offer a review here.  Heritage Motor Centre is where you can also get a certified copy of the factory record on your Healey.  The CD may be purchased directly from Heritage Motor Centre, or from Victoria British Ltd and others.  I checked the currency conversion rates and decided to buy direct from Heritage.  I received the CD in about one week.

To quote the blurb from Victoria British, “Each CD-ROM, focusing on one model or family of models, has the same format: the original parts catalogs are followed by the workshop manuals and driver’s handbooks, all reproduced in an easy-to-use and easy-to-print PDF format. There’s never been before in one package anywhere near this level of detailed, comprehensive information about your Austin Healey! Also included on the CD-ROM is PDF reader software. (System requirements: Windows 98, Pentium 266 MHZ and 64 MB RAM.) If the tamper proof seal on the CD case is broken, it may be returned for an exchange for the same part number only.”

The key points here are two, first the CDs do not work on Windows Vista, and do not work on non-windows systems (ie Mac or Linux).  Second, the actual manuals are in PDF format.

What they don’t tell you is that the CDs are strongly copy protected.  You can not make a back-up copy of the CD.  While you can browse the CD and find the individual PDF files, you can not open them up yourself with a PDF reader because they are encrypted with a program called Hexalock.  You must view the content using the Flash based interface provided on the CD and it requires that you use the Adobe  Reader or Adobe Acrobat programs to view the PDFs.

They do provide the Reader program on the CD, although it is an old version (6.0).  The current version of Adobe Reader is 9.0.  All of this caused significant issues for me.  First of all, I wanted to read these manuals on my laptop.  But my laptop does not have a CD player.  It does have software that can read an image file made from a CD, but the copy protection that this product uses, requires special CDs and senses that you are not using the original CD.  So that did not work.

I also had problems because I have both Acrobat and Reader installed on my system.  The CD always launched Acrobat whch would display the first page of the PDF but then hang.  Now I don’t know if that is an issue with the copy protection software or with Acrobat.  But if the CD is in the player, and I have run the program to view the CD  (which loads a system service on your task bar), then I can browse the cd and manually open the PDFs in Reader.  Whew….

Now other people who only have Reader installed may be able to run and view the contents without any problems.  I’ll review the  interface later on.

But since I really want to read these publications on my laptop I went looking for a solution.  I finally found one, a program that would allow me to fool the copy protection software and save unencrypted PDF file copies.  That will let me load the PDF files onto my laptop, but I will not be able to view them via the CD interface.  That isn’t much of a concern for me.  If I want a pretty interface I can create one myself.  For now I’ll simply open the individual files with a free third party PDF reader (Foxit).

So enough of my rants.  What is the CD like?  Well it does have all of the original 3000 manuals and publications on it.  The publications you get are:

Parts Publications
3000 BN7, BT7 1959 to 1962 – Service Parts List
3000 BJ7, BJ8 1962 to 1968 – Mechanical Service Parts List
3000 BJ7, BJ8 1962 to 1968 – Body Service Parts List

Service Publications
100/6, 3000 1956 to 1968 – Workshop Manual

Owners’ Literature
3000 BN7, BT7, BJ7 1959 to 1963- Driver’s Handbook
3000 BJ8 1963 to 1968 – Driver’s Handbook

When you load the CD and launch the start program a Flash file begins to play.  Here is the first screen:

You click continue and go to:

From here you use the menu on the left to select the type of publication you are looking for.  For example, you can select workshop publications which takes you to a screen with only one publication on it.  Click on that one publication and you go to a screen that shows:

Click on the topic you want to view and the program launches Adobe Reader to view the PDF.  Note that the PDF is protected and you can not save a copy of it from the Reader.  You also can’t print the entire document out as a PDF file.  If you try to, you will get the following alert:

But you can print pages out.  Which is great because you can print the four or five pages out that you need for the task at hand and take those into your shop to work from.  This keeps your real workshop manual from getting torn and greasy.

Here is a sample of a portion of a page from a PDF:

Click for enlarged view

So there you go…. If you are a Windows user, pre Vista, this is a nice addition to your CD collection.  Even with the issues I found I am happy that I have this.

Bob Wallace