What's actually in Clark's Garage
Clark's Garage is the best free repair resource the Porsche 944 has. Over several weeks I read every page of its shop manual and made notes on each one. That was 179 pages; ten more have since been recovered from web archives, and the figures below are counted over all 189. Here is what is in there, which pages are not what they look like, and why you should save the ones you care about.
The reason I read all of it is mundane: I was writing software that reads repair pages, and the only honest way to know whether it worked was to check it against every page rather than the handful that were easy. That turned into a catalog, and the catalog turned out to be more interesting than the software.
What the manual is made of
Roughly 141 pages give up a clean numbered procedure — the ones with a tools list at the top and steps below, which is what most people picture when they think of the site.
Around 48 pages are reference material rather than repair procedures. Fault codes, fuse and relay lists, specifications, troubleshooting tables. They are some of the most useful pages on the site, but if you arrive expecting steps you will not find any, because there were never any to find.
A small number describe a procedure in prose rather than as a numbered list — BODY-04 is one example. The instructions are all there; they are just written as paragraphs, so they are easy to skim past when you are looking for a numbered list.
127 pages list the tools you need before you start. Reading that list before you start a job on a Saturday is the difference between finishing it and not.
39 pages tell you to do something else first. 35 of them name the procedure you need; four say "None" explicitly, which is its own kind of useful.
Six pages hold more than one procedure
This is the finding I would most want to know as an owner. Six pages have their own contents list partway down, with several distinct jobs underneath. If you arrive from a search engine or a bookmark, you can easily read the first job and never realize the rest of the page is there.
| Page | What else is on it |
|---|---|
| BODY-03 | Sunroof — several separate procedures |
| BODY-12 | Door handles |
| COOL-01 | Cooling system |
| ELECT-18 | Electrical |
| ELECT-19 | Electrical |
| STEER-01 | Steering |
If one of those covers a job you are about to do, scroll the whole page before you start.
There are 144 safety callouts, and they are easy to miss
Across the manual there are 144 paragraphs marked NOTE or CAUTION. They are set in the same typeface as everything else and they sit inline in the middle of numbered lists, so they read as ordinary steps when you are scanning ahead. Several of them are the difference between a job going well and a trip to the emergency room. They are worth slowing down for.
Some pages have broken HTML
33 pages never close their <a name="..."> anchors. Everything after that point ends up wrapped inside a link that was never meant to be there.
This does not affect reading the site. Browsers cope with it and the steps display normally. What it does affect is tools: if you have ever tried to save, print, convert or archive a page from Clark's Garage and had the result come out wrong or truncated, malformed anchors are a likely reason. BODY-03, CYL-02 and ELECT-19 are three I hit; there are others.
The same goes for the page furniture. Every page carries "Acrobat Printable Version", a section code and a copyright line, and anything that processes the page automatically tends to drag those in as if they were part of the procedure.
The pictures are better organized than they look
There are 517 distinct images across the manual. Most of them sit inside the step they illustrate rather than in a gallery at the bottom, which is unusual for a site of this vintage and is genuinely thoughtful — the manual's notes often say "the picture below", and the picture is below.
A few oddities: ENG-12's images are small thumbnails, and SUSP-06 and TRANS-02 include formulas as images rather than text, so they will not come through if you copy the text of those pages.
The part that matters most
The site no longer appears to be actively maintained. Going by discussions on the owner forums, its original author is no longer involved, and whoever administers it now has been difficult to reach. Community members have already started archiving it privately because there is no visible plan for what happens to it.
Nothing about the site suggests it is going away tomorrow. But it is a single unmaintained website, and it is the single best free source of 944 repair information in existence. Those two facts should not sit together as comfortably as they currently do.
If you rely on it, save the pages you rely on. Keep them for your own use in the garage. They remain the work of their authors, so don't republish or share them.
- Chrome on Android: open the page, menu, then Download. It saves the whole page, pictures included, as one file.
- Desktop browsers: File, then Save Page As, and choose "Webpage, Complete" rather than HTML only.
Do it for the jobs you know are coming — belts, water pump, clutch, whatever your car is due. It takes a minute per page and it means a site outage in three years is an inconvenience rather than a problem.
A note on what I do
I make Ref Sensor, an Android app that saves repair pages onto your phone and pulls the steps, tools and torque specs out of them so you can work through a job one step at a time in the garage. Auditing it against Clark's Garage is how this catalog came about. The app is not required for anything in this article — the saving instructions above work on their own, and the index is the useful part either way.
Clark's Garage is an independent website. Its shop manual and pages carry a © 1998 Clark's Garage notice and are the work of their authors, and remain theirs. This article is an independent catalog that describes the site and does not reproduce its pages. Fischer Interactive LLC has no connection with it, and nothing here is published with its involvement or endorsement. Page counts and codes were recorded in September 2026 and the site may have changed since. Porsche and 944 are trademarks of Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, used here only to say which car is meant.
© 2026 Fischer Interactive LLC.