For reasons that escape me, when I bought my Factory Helm manual for my '85 Cougar, I purchased a used copy. I've been careful with it, but several of the pages have come unbound and it's a pain in the butt to use when I need to. http://www.helminc.com shows nothing anymore for our cars (thanks buttholes!) so I guess ebay is the only real way to get factory manuals any more?
I'm tempted to unbind the whole thing and run it though a copier to make a digital copy to prevent further degradation.
I bought my 84 Shop Manuals new and they are falling apart.
I got my 01 Grand Marquis manuals on CD. Now I keep an old XP computer to read it on. Won't work on 7,8 or 10.
I might ;) have the Ford CD manual sets from the 90s-2000s laying around somewhere. Haven't pulled them out since I upgraded from XP. They were quite helpful when I was looking into the 3.8L SP swap.
Toyota (and I think others) have a subscription method for their manuals. For $15, I can get a 2 day subscription to all their shop manuals. Downside is you have to manually download every section you want. A bit annoying. Toyota only goes back to 1990.
Went to boltin' my heads back on and turns out the only page missing from my '85 Manual is the one with HG torque. My Chilton and Hayes manuals are falling apart so I looked into getting new ones. At least I can get the Chilton Manual (http://"https://www.chiltondiymanuals.com/products/productID/74"), although it covers '83-'97. Hayes no longer covers (http://"https://haynes.com/en-us/car-manuals/ford") '83-'88. Helm still doesn't carry sh*t for our cars and Ford only starts at 1994+.
84 shop manual head bolt torque for the 3.8L.
84 shop manual head bolt torque for 5.0L and 5.8L.
Exact same as my Chilton/Hayes manual, so that's good! Thanks
Found a way to get new manuals. Bishko Automotive Literature. http://www.autobooksbishko.com/
For '87, they've got a PDF of the shop manual on optical media, and print version of the emissions manual. No EVTM for the T'bird.
The PDF manual is pretty good quality. Everything OCR'd. A light watermark in the middle of every page that is minorly annoying. Can find it on Rockauto.com for significantly cheaper.
Looks like what they have varies by year. Not sure why they don't have everything.