Customer Reviews

Chilton's Chrysler: Front Wheel Drive 1981-91 Repair Manual (Chilton's Total Car Care Repair Manual)

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I have owned this book since about 1994 and every time I look at it, I remember everything I hate about it. I've used this for a 1988 Dodge Shadow (very common 2.2L engine) and most of it still applies to my 1994 Plymouth Acclaim (3.0L engine).

My first gripe is the last instruction that always reads, "Installation is the reverse of removal procedure." In its most generic form, this statement is always true. In real application, there are often tricks and things to lookout for. Maybe I need to torque one set of bolts before I do others, maybe there is a pitfall that is easily avoided.

This book leaves a lot of vague things unexplained. For timing belt procedure, the first step is to position the #1 cylinder at top dead center. Remind me again, which cylinder is #1? I buy these things to remind me of such things.

When I remove the crank gear to expose the front seal, does this car use a hella-tight fit that requires a very special puller (Like the Dodge Shadow was), or is it loose over the shaft like other cars I've done? I expect this kind of heads up from a book like this.

This book lists the front seal replacement in 10 steps. It starts as if you just walked up to an engine and the whole side was already taken apart and is staring you in the face. Granted this section occurs after the timing belt section (7 pages afterward) but a first timer trying to size up the job may not realize that a front seal is going to take a whole day or maybe two.

A big portion of this book consists of electrical diagrams, which I would tend to really appreciate. Although, when I had an ongoing electrical problem with my 1988 Shadow, this book was useless and didn't seem to have my configuration or else it didn't lead me to the right place. Never did resolve that issue. That car also had a vacuum leak that affected the actuation of the heater setting. Floor/Dash/Window. The diagrams in here read about like microfiche and I don't recall ever finding the particular diagram that I needed. Ultimately I think I had some kind of vacuum check valve leaking and I never dealt with that before selling the car either.

To its credit, this book has some guidelines and specifications, bolt tighten sequences that would probably be helpful under the right circumstances.

My impression has always been that this was a low budget, watered down, mass produced book by someone who was assigned to produce it rather than by a highly experienced who really knows his way around cars, takes a lot of care in his work, and who has both encountered and is aware of the most likely complications of your routine repairs on cars as they age.

The book has some value, but I am disappointed with it every single time I crack it open. I fall back on the experiences of having always done my own car repairs growing up.

I would also suggest that with the millions and millions of 2.2L 4-cyl engines that Chrysler has put out there, there is cause for the authors to have invested a lot more time and energy about those engines than what they did.