Are there any OEMs whose service manuals are hard to find? I restore cars and motorcycles and have never had trouble finding a pdf or hard copy for around $20. Its good that they are doing this though a lot of the secrets I’d want to know about an electric motorcycle are about the ECU when that software is some of the most tightly guarded of any.
I acquired an old Sony CMT-EX1 CD player a while back and was tinkering around with it. I found the service manual online and was blown away. There are pinouts! Block diagrams [0] for the PCBs! Capacitor inventories! I wish we still did this for consumer hardware.
Japanese service manuals for electronics, especially ones starting in the early 80's when the printing quality started getting really good, are a sight to behold. In the era before the EDA software did everything, the annotated schematics and PCB board layouts in the manuals are gorgeous, especially those by Sony and Matsushita / Panasonic.
When the EDA tools started making the prints fully automatically and all the tables and notes just became automated outputs to PDF... it kinda killed a bit of the artistry that went into the layouts of the prints. I also feel that the care and choosing the fonts / lettering styles / etc. have become eschewed in favor of just putting out whatever the defaults are from current software without care of adjustment. It's why all published schematics these days look alike, and boring by comparison.
The early Walkman manuals are a good example of this:
> killed a bit of the artistry that went into the layouts
Yes. Absolutely.
Sadly, EDA tools like KiCad and Altium (two of the ones I use most often) make absolutely ugly schematics. Just horrible looking stuff. I always thought this had to do with engineers who did not necessarily come up drawing schematics by hand.
In the later-70's to early 80's --and a little beyond-- you could pickup magazines like Byte and Popular Electronics and see beautifully drawn schematics that were well laid-out and easy to understand. Same with data books. I built lots of projects from those magazines back then. Later on, professionally, I developed a schematic drafting style that mimicked the beautiful schematics from those publications.
CAD requires an effort. You can produce great looking schematics. It depends on how you choose to produce your libraries. We make libraries that make great looking schematics. The difference in legibility is, in my opinion, worth the time we spend creating good looking symbols and parts.
Making old technology viable instead of buying new one, or even worse tinkering with it and unlocking or adding new functionality corporations reserved for higher end models, professional equipment or just outright didn't want to implement assured it will never happen. In the past only few tinkerers actually cared about this. Now everything is on the internet and everyone have access to it. This is a season for planed obsolescence after all.
this is out of nowhere but if anyone can help me find a service manual (not owners manual) for a Yamaha Clavinova CLP-50 i would be in deep gratitude. a few octaves intermittently don't work and i'd love to tinker
BMW no longer sells service manuals for their bikes.
There are, essentially, bootlegs on line, but my understanding is that while before they had a dedicated Window application for their manuals, they're moving to an online only system, and only for dealers.
So, while there are manuals floating around now, who knows how that will go moving forward.
Obviously, this will be a key sticking point in the future with the "right to repair" laws trickling through the state legislatures.
What’s the rationale for not releasing a manual? To force you to take into a dealer for service? It’s not like they have to make a separate manual. It has to exist for the dealer anyway right?
The $200/hr service charge most european motorcycle dealers charge. There are two things I can't do myself. Particularly, bleeding the ABS (which requires the dealer tool) and re-shimming the engine (which also requires a dealer tool).
My local stealership wants exactly $200/hr for every service. An oil change for my motorcycle is $300, a brake job is $650. Mind you parts for these jobs are in the mid-to-low XX's. It's ALL service fees. Reshimming the engine (once every 15k miles or so) costs a minimum of $1200 going up to $2000 if the engine needs significant adjustment. I've shimmed sportbikes for years and 6-8 hours worth of work is insane. I can do it in a few hours excluding the time to go get beer.
It's borderline theft. "Stealership" is not tongue in cheek. I am seriously considering trading in my motorcycle for cash (even at a loss) and re-buying an old R100GS.
I think it may depend on brands and models. When I take my specific Honda in for the scheduled maintenance, the dealer seems to apply a standard, Honda-dictated price, which is the same at all the dealerships I've visited. This usually includes the labor and replacement for the parts which the manual says need replacing on a schedule, except for fluids. If I need tires, brake pads, that's separate.
I know this is a fixed price because last time I took it in, it was a "bigger" service, where they had to check valve clearances. But apparently something went wrong when they tried to take apart something (I forget the details) so they had to work much longer than expected on it. In the end, I didn't have to pay more than I had expected, taking it in.
Now, all this isn't to say it's cheap. I was horrified with the prices: it often costs more than my Mercedes' service at a Mercedes dealership.
That depends on the number of cylinders, valves per cylinder, and so on. Your parallel twin is probably easier to service (accessability of valve covers, valve mechanism). Some designs require the removal of the gas tank and even camshafts (eg Suzuki V-Strom).
(Old) Ducatis are also a pain with the desmodromic valves (i.e. springless valves). Some of their valves have 0,0 clearance and the mechanic needs to hone down shims to an exact fit. Also the reshimming needs to be redone on older Ducs after only a few thousand kilometers/miles, or annually.
In contrast, BMWs older air/oilcooled boxer engines are a joy to service, easiest accessability (cylinder heads stick out sideways), only 3 tools needed for adjusting valve clearances (two types of Torx/allen keys and a feeler gauge set), 20mins of work or less depending on your routine.
MY 90 minute number includes pulling the fuel tank, valve cover, camshafts and other body panels from my Suzuki. It's pretty quick if you're familiar with the procedure. I can have that bike torn down with all body panels and subframe off in about 10 minutes if I'm in a hurry.
Ugh, pulling and especially re-inserting the camshaft shouldnt be done in a hurry. At least from my experience with the V-Strom's V-engine. Needs to be cooled down and insertion of the camshaft needs proper care (no dinging of the bearing shells) and one must make sure to not skip a tooth at the geartrain/chain.
I mean, I take my time with the cams, but it's not rocket science. There's timing marks to help line everything up and I snap a pic with my phone before taking them out.
Yep, you can bleed it physically but the system will refuse to re-activate the ABS until you trigger something in the ROM. Absolutely insane. You can't get even order the tool directly from Triumph to do it because you need to be some kind of verified auto mechanic for them.
Even the oil change was a pain. I had to quite literally crush the dealer oil filter and break it off in pieces with a pipe wrench because it was shaped in such a way you needed a special tool to get a grip on it. I called the dealer, the tool was $180 and would take 3 weeks to ship. It only worked with Triumph brand oil filters (probably white labeled semi-custom K&N's) and they wanted $60 for a filter (vs. $14 for a K&N at the local bike parts store).
Even my best universal clamps + duct tape + sandpaper couldn't hold a grip on the stupid filter. Several trips to the local auto parts store trading wrenches back and forth until I said fuck it and went to Home Depot. Lucky for me a K&N oil filter fit exactly (dummies still used a standard thread for the oil filter port)...otherwise that would've been somewhat hard to explain. Even the crush washer for the drain plug was 10x as expensive... ended up taking the old one to Ace and finding a replacement for 10 cents. The only thing that was about equal in price was the recommended oil which I was able to score on sale at Walmart but otherwise would've been a wash.
As you can tell I can not stop complaining about this stupid thing. Do yourself a favor and avoid Euro motorcycles.
Honda is pretty decent. Suzuki doesn't sell service data but the info you need is readily available from Clymer. Royal Enfield is fantastic for service data.
Most Japanese bikes are very user friendly. Even the newer ones aren't terrible to work on. If you want the easiest mix of technology and ease of repair shoot for a Japanese motorcycles before 2014-ish.
Not condoning the prices your stealership charges, but consider:
Have you spent thousands of dollars out of your own pocket for the tools you use at your job? Do you have to maintain a commercial brick and mortar location? How much are your services worth?
> have you spent thousands of dollars out of your own pocket for the tools
Yes, but it is not my job. I would estimate my tool's at around $5000 or so. Collected over a little under 2 decades of riding.
> Do you have to maintain a commercial brick and mortar
No. But a Japanese bike shop has the same tools and brains as the stealership and charges half as much.
It's well known dealers upcharge for everything. If you don't believe me, find the best 3rd party shop in town and simply compare hourly rates. You may even ask them to itemize a modestly challenging job (CV boots for a car, maybe) that would need a skyjack. I would bet dollars to donuts the dealer price is 1.5x-2x more.
"Special" motorcycles (e.g. euro motorcycles in America) are NOTORIOUS for absurd dealer upcharges. It wasn't until ECUs started becoming smart that this was a problem. I could service a 90s-0x's BMW, for example, for pennies on the dollar to BMW's specification in my own garage. This is why Right To Repair is so important. Car dealers are the tip of the spear in the fight against it because they lose quite literally millions because of people like me. It's one of the reasons I will never own an EV as long as I live. They are (especially Tesla's) money printers on 4 wheels for the dealer.
My Triumph, for example, has no fundamental reason I need to plug in and tell the ECU I bled my ABS. No reason AT ALL. They do this because if you do the work yourself they can still charge you an hour (~200 dollars) to plug their tool in, re-enable your ABS, and give you a finger wag about doing work yourself. This is the John Deere-ization of consumer vehicles. This isn't unique to Triumph. Many consumer brand cars have the same problems. They even build in anti-tampers (such as the oil filter I had to literally break into pieces to remove). Modern vehicles are hostile to the consumer. The auto lobbies would tell you this is because the "advanced technology" but in reality it's used exactly like John Deere does. That is, to screw the consumer out of every single penny for even the most modest of trivialities.
Less than 3. Job's simple when you don't charge by a book. I am not even particularly adept at it. Just familiar. Someone with thousands of bikes under their belt could probably reshim an engine in an hour.
A legitimate reason is to move the service data online so it can be continuously updated and accessible from a web browser instead of the chunky Windows app they were using before straight out of 1995.
But other manufacturers who do this make the data available to consumers via AllData or similar services. BMW does not, presumably to make more money on service.
For modern vehicles, the dealers really don't use manuals anymore. They connect their proprietary diagnostic computer, it runs all the tests and figures out what is wrong, and tells the mechanic what to replace or adjust.
You can sometimes find bootlegs of these computers (generally a "tough" Windows laptop with software and connecting cables). They usually don't have the latest and greatest version of the software, but if your car is older/out of warranty it's generally covered. I don't know if they get them from a recycle stream or dealer mechanics sell their old ones or how it works.
The computer diagnostics don’t tell the technician how to do the replacement. The service manual has all of the procedures, parts lists, and special tools necessary for the job.
This doesn't make any sense. Many regular issues are not diagnosable by computer. I have legacy access to some current BMW service data and it does not behave the way you describe at all- I only have to whip out the scanner for certain electrical and computer issues, and to update service schedules.
Everything on a modern car runs through the computer. Climate control, entertainment systems, windows, lights, seats, various driver aids such as cruise control, lane-departure, blind spot warnings, hands-free driving, automatic/antilock braking, traction control, etc. as well as the engine and transmisison. Sure, something like a failing wheel bearing would still be diagnosed by the mechanic, but they need the scanners for most of the problems on a modern car.
You're right, but just to have fun with the example you gave- some wheel bearings now incorporate a wheel speed sensor. So even those might, in fact, be first diagnosed by the computer, depending on the failure mode.
Yup, exactly. I was one of the last mortals to get a copy of the software for my BMW motorcycle and now field emails from riders worldwide looking for service data.
I fully expect the Apple model next, where even if you can physically replace a part, the system will refuse to operate until the new part is blessed by the proprietary software.
That is really bad I did not know that. I assume it goes for automobiles too. Have no plans to get a new BMW bike but I will definitely take that into consideration in the future.
Triumph in particular is notorious for this. For most bikes made beyond 2018 or so there are nearly no 3rd party manuals available. You have to pay, quite literally by the page or by the hour, to view the manuals on their website.
For older bikes its often easier. Clymer's has a substantial library that are often better than even the dealer mechanic book. I'm the mechanic among my group of friends and newer bikes are exceedingly difficult to not only work on, but also find proper manuals for.
It’s impossible to get them for a modern Volvo, for example. I couldn’t even get them to provide me with a wiring diagram for the rear fuse block so I could wire in a trailer brake controller. I managed it via inspection, but it was really poor.
I pay like $8/month for access to my 2021 Triumph’s service manual.
As far as I know they keep it as an interactive website so that PDFs are hard to make.
I haven’t found a good copy yet but it’s also possible that I’m just not as good at searching for pirated content as back in the old torrenting days (or perhaps just less motivated)
Do they not go out of their way to make it difficult? I had to scrounge google which led me to a forum thread for Triumph bike manuals. Only managed to get a link to a website associated with Triumph where they let you pay on a per day basis to look at manuals. Spent almost an hour making folders and manually downloading every individual section.
My takeaway is that they want their bikes to get serviced at dealers rather than allow people to more easily work on their own bikes.
I have a 2003 Citroen and it's easy to find the service manual but very hard to use it.
It's not a PDF you can just flip through, it's software.
You have to run it in a windows XP VM, following a very specific set of installation instructions. Getting locked out for no reason is very common (so you just boot a backup of the VM).
I waited for a technical thread to ask this question: where can DIYers that want to fix their own car get a manual with wiring diagrams, service bullettins, troubleshooting procedures without paying alot in subscription (hundreds per year)?
Haynes or Chilton manuals (they are the same company now). You can pick them up at auto parts stores, Amazon, or buy PDFs online.
They are based on the official tech manuals and only cover the stuff that is within reason of a home or small shop mechanic, and don't require you to have manufacturer specific tools in most cases.
Your mention of "restore" suggests mainly older models, which certainly did have far more widely-distributed service literature and are simpler than newer vehicles.
It’s possibly because I’m looking for Australian models and it’s a smaller market, but I’ve never had much luck finding service manuals free or paid for my vehicles. Do you have any tips for where to search?
I should say specific examples are the Ford Territory and the Great Wall Steed (Wingle 6 in the domestic market).
Those are models I haven’t heard of. The best place used to be enthusiast forums but in the past decade that has switched to Facebook groups for a lot of vehicles.
