Just want to share an excellent resource for car repair information: Internet Newsgroups (NGs).
NGs work like an online email bulletin board. People all over the country post to these groups, and others can reply, forming a "thread. There are NGs on every conceivable topic, and quite a few that areINconceivable! Last i looked, there were close to 50,000 newsgroups!
The ones we are interested in will have names like rec.autos.tech, alt.trucks.ford, rec.autos.makers.honda
You can access them in many ways, the most common of which is through your email program. For our purposes, the search engine Google works best.
Say a customer comes in with a problem on a 1996 F150 pickup - intermittent airbag light, flashing a code 24. Good luck finding an airbag code in most manuals.
Go to your internet PC, point your browser to www.google.com. Then click on the "Groups" tab.
In the search window, type "Ford airbag code 24" and click "search". The result will be a long list of links, each pointing to a newsgroup post that contains the words in your search criteria. Go through them and find the one that best answers the question, and print it out for your customer.
Don't forget to sell him the parts indicated for the repair
I have used this for years to diagnose my own vehicles and those of friends. I think it would be an excellent service to offer your customers who may not have access to this resource.
Next up: Offering OBS II code scanning (and re-setting) like Zone does. We are working on a deal for you.
