Technical documentation, the hobbyist’s best friend

When I ask you about technical documentation, one of several pictures probably came to mind:

• An engineer pours over an absurdly large folder filled with complicated technical drawings as they try to fix a large, complex industrial machine.
• A scientist in a lab checks thier OEM manual as a complicated machine mixes fluids together for some reason.

You may think of something slightly different. But, I’m pretty sure that most of you will be thinking about something related to work – whether it is robotics engineers working on autonomous systems, software devs beavering away at coding, or machinists working on big bits of kit, the people who are using the documentation will be doing serious work in a professional setting.

However, people tend to forget that technical documentation is not all work and no play. Technical documentation is an essential part of many leisure activities, and without it, life would be a lot duller. Technical documentation such as owner’s manuals, product documentation or configuration guides, are a key part of many hobbies.

So, in this blog, I’m going to explain how technical documentation, far from just being functional content for serious professional purposes, helps us enjoy the things we love doing in our spare time.

Cars

Around three years ago, I decided to get a headstart on my midlife crisis and ‘invested’ (at least, that’s what I tell my long-suffering partner) in a convertible car. The car in question was a 1997 MGF (with VVC, but not a trophy model to my fellow British car enthusiasts). There were a few potential issues:

1. I have no mechanical experience to speak of.
2. I had bought a British-made car that was over 25 years old and on a ‘trade’ deal. Anyone who knows about cars will spot several mistakes I made here.

In the first six months, I faced a myriad of issues. Firstly, the car’s suspension gradually lowered to the point where minor potholes felt like bone-shattering crashes. Then, the car’s immobiliser triggered after a bout of damp weather, meaning the car wouldn’t start. Lastly, I noticed over the summer that the coolant system was gradually losing its efficiency; on a car with a K-series engine, which has a reputation for overheating, it is quite important for the coolant system to be working as well as possible.

Luckily for me, I had my handy owner’s handbook, access to the MG Owners forums, and some fantastic third-party documentation such as Roger Parker’s excellent ‘Everyday modifications to your MGF and TF’. Armed with this abundance of technical information, I managed to soldier on and get to grips with maintaining the hydrogas suspension system, replace the pesky faulty fuses that tripped the immobiliser, and manually flush out the gunk clogging up my radiator and coolant system. Thanks to this technical content, even as a mechanical novice, I have been able to keep my car on the road and out of an expensive garage. This technical content was also helpful in informing me about some basic preventative maintenance, as well as suggesting various quality-of-life upgrades.

Looking at the wider picture, technical documentation is key for petrol heads for a variety of reasons – it helps owners of older cars keep their classics on the road long after the model has been discontinued. For some classic models, car enthusiast communities will create their own technical documentation to help fellow members fix issues or replace parts with modified third-party versions long after the originals have been used. It also helps modding enthusiasts customise their cars and express their personalities through their vehicles, from replacing bits of interior trim, all the way to turning a Mazda MX-5 into a 4-wheel drive off-roader. In this way, technical documentation really helps classic cars keep going, and lets people put their personality into their cars.

Gaming

Gaming is an expensive hobby at the best of times. PC gaming more so. With games becoming ever more graphically demanding, gaming PC manufacturers seem to be in an arms race with developers as they try to keep up with more and more resource-intensive games. New graphics cards, storage solutions, and just the sheer amount of RAM needed to run modern games mean that gaming PCs are constantly evolving and improving. Anyone who remembers the ‘But can it run Crysis?’ memes from the late noughties knows only too well what I mean.

However, for the average gamer it can be impractical to buy a new gaming laptop or PC every year – with a high-spec PC costing north of £1,500, many find this wildly expensive to keep up. But some manufacturers are quite in tune with their consumers and create simple and easy-to-access documentation that very clearly states how to upgrade and replace parts of your gaming rig.

I personally found the documentation for the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 very useful and it helped me through a number of upgrades such as adding a large solid-state drive, and doubling the capacity of the RAM chips. The documentation clearly set out how you perform certain upgrades, with clear instructions, simple diagrams, and a handy ‘Prerequisites’ section that clearly showed what tools you needed to get the job done. These upgrades not only ensured that my gaming laptop was able to keep up with the latest games for a number of years, but when it did finally go to silicon heaven, Dell was my first port of call for my next laptop, and my first recommendation to anyone wanting a laptop themselves.

Here, technical documentation was a great way to ensure I got the most fun and use out of my laptop, extending the lifespan of a costly product, and fostering some all-important customer loyalty in me.

Music

Many of us have, at some point in our lives, dreamed of becoming musicians. Personally, my life plan at 16 was to go to college, meet some like-minded potential rockstars, form a band, and somehow muddle my way into playing a sellout stadium tour while releasing multiple platinum records. Unfortunately, I only got as far as playing one gig at a birthday party and helping a friend serenade his then-girlfriend Roxanne (I’ll let you guess which song we sang to her and her embarrassed flatmates). However, I do have fond memories of getting new bits of kit or recording software and checking the owner’s manuals with friends, working out how we were going to use them to hone our ‘sound’.

A couple of really good examples spring to mind: the Marshall amps owner’s manual, which I’ve spoken about in a previous blog, and the recording software for Apple’s ‘GarageBand’ are examples of manuals being easy to parse for the layperson, but detailed enough to really get the most from these products. I vividly remember using GarageBand to record covers of songs and finding something that should have been very complicated, very easy and intuitive to use, thanks to Apple’s information portal for GarageBand. The Marshall owner’s manuals were also instrumental in helping me and my friends quickly work out how to get the right tones, set up foot pedals, and generally making full use of the amplifiers.

These manuals ensured that myself and my fellow wannabe musicians enjoyed using these sometimes complex bits of equipment, without it feeling overly complicated or hard-to-use. It also ensured that we made repeat purchases, and recommend these products to others. Unfortunately, they were not good enough to get us multi-million pound recording contracts, but then again, I don’t think any documentation would.

Even more hobbies

Its not just these hobbies in which documentation plays an important role – speaking to a few of my colleagues in a coffee break, they threw in the following suggestions:

• Cooking: Using new kitchen appliances, like multicookers or coffee machines, often requires reading the user manual first, and can help users use their appliances to do things they may not have thought possible. Personally, I very much rate air fryer brownies.
• Photography: Using advanced cameras and photo editing equipment requires knowledge of the instructions to fully utilise their capabilities. Many companies provide extensive documentation so that users can get to grips with complex products.
• DIY Projects: Assembling furniture (IKEA Assembly Instructions) and generally repairing household items. Not sure I’d consider this a hobby myself, but each to their own.
• Lego: to which the instructions on some of the larger kits are very necessary, as anyone who has tried to wing it quickly finds out.

I could go on, but I think I’ve given you enough examples to prove that technical documentation helps us enjoy our leisure time, and shouldn’t just be thought of as documentation that we use at work. It’s a vital part of many of our hobbies, and helps us enjoy our favourite leisure activities.

And if you have any technical documentation that you would like us to help you with, or if you’d like to discuss the finer points of the hydrogas suspension system, feel free to contact us here.