The best places to get your cordite-covered paws on some gun manuals can be tough to find. However, we though we would search for your benefit to provide you with some advice about the best places to look for reliable manuals within a limited budget. Many of the places we thought were best are online so you’ll at least need access to a computer and modem, but then this article is online as well, so it shouldn’t be a problem for you!

WeaponsCombat.com is one of the best web sites for the publication of guns manuals and schematics. This web site boasts a wide range of free-to-access firearms manuals as well as advice on the dos and don’ts of home security. There’s also a ton of other interesting and useful e-books and articles about guns.

A basic look for ‘firearm manuals’ yields some positive results from the really big search engines. One of the most intriguing sites was StevesPages which provides great free PDF files of a selection of manufacturers’ manuals for weapons including the popular Glock 11. ReloadBench provides a comparable service while you have to pay for some things on ArmyMilitaryManuals.

If you have a great computer, you can probably afford the diskspace and try downloading the manuals which can be downloaded in bulk from bit-torrent websites. However, this might not be the best idea as you’ll not be able to inspect the file before downloading and, as with most torrents, you can get corrupted files which will destroy your computer.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to wait around for your dinosaur computer to get the large files, you could hit your public reference library and ask them to request the books from the nearest copyright library. If you are tired of searching and are willing to pay, you might contact an armory or a weapons manufacturer as they should be able to point you in the direction of a fresh copy for a concession.

One final site you might try is the best which we saved for last, the ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of guns manuals, the aptly named FirearmsManuals. This site has a live community filled with people trading in and selling old and new manuals, not to mention a range of options that allow you read manuals for free and you can even buy sections of rare manuals so that you only pay for what you wanted and not for useless pages which might include a lot of padding. This site is definitely one of the most useful in the genre and although it may be further down in the search lists, it does exactly what its domain name suggests.