Now my TLC is all gone, my car is out of warranty, and BMW/MINI dealer's servicing costs are just a bit expensive ( ), I thought I'd go the DIY route. Ooer!
Bought a Haynes manual today from my local Halfords. Best £16 I've ever spent on my car. Will be changing the brake fluid tomorrow and re-setting the service interval indicator.
What an exciting life I lead
Anyone else bought one or been doing their own servicing and avoiding the dealers?
I've got one. My only complaint about it is it is very old fashined and sometime difficult to make out the pictures. When is the Haynes manual going to go full colour?
Glossy pages will also make them less susceptable to oily finger prints.
I've got the Haynes and the Bentley manuals, much prefer the Bentley. I need them
as I like pulling cars apart (the easy part). Eventually I have to put them back together
usually when I can find my spare clips as some always break.
Some people are like a Slinky ........ not really good for anything, but you still can't help
but smile when you shove them down the stairs
where can you get the bentley one from. link? havent seen that one before. I have the hayned but me and my bf have already spotted many mistakes in it about the MINI which dosent give me much faith.
Does the Bentley manual have photos? And better quality ones than the Haynes?
Quoting the Amazon link: A comprehensive, single source of service information and specifications for the new Mini, this reference is based on factory information and supplemented by hands-on experience and illustrations
Illustrations ?
I'd sooner have actual photos and agree with Root Ginger.
Better quality paper and colour photos would be good. Even if the price for the Haynes manual were to rise to £30, that's still less than a 1/3 of the price BMW/MINI dealers/stealers charge for 1 hours labour.
The Bentley manual has some photos and some illustrations. They're not color. I wouldn't say that they're better quality than the Haynes manual. The Bentley manual is also printed on paper that is of similar (low) quality--it seems to be the way they do all workshop manuals. The main advantage of the Bentley manual (and why it costs so much more) is that it's about 10x thicker than the Haynes--it also includes 10x more information. The Bentley manual is more of a professional mechanic's type manual, while the Haynes is more of a weekend hobbyist's manual.
I've got the Bentley manual and it has the absolute worst wiring diagrams
I have ever seen in an auto manual. I would really like to see if the Haynes
manual has better.
The wiring diagrams are very simple to follow in The Haynes Manual. They seem to have changed them from the complicated ones they used to have in their older manuals.
I noticed Haynes also do a MINI modification manual. This is full colour and covers things like suspension changes, pulley changes etc. That's what prompted me to ask if the Bentley manual was colour too. Straight away illustrating in colour makes the pictures so much easier to look at.
It took some time studying the diagrams, and finding all the places you need
to look for identifier numbers, but now that I've done that, the Bentley wiring
diagrams are just great. (Except there's something wrong with ELE 61-63)
I can find things quickly and there is rarely a time when I have to follow a thin
line all over the place to see where I wire goes like some other manuals.
I also LOVE that they mark the wire colors and gauge right in the schematic.
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Haynes MINI Owners Workshop Manual 
), I thought I'd go the DIY route. Ooer! 
?
