Passes & Canyons Blog

With so much of the world currently shut down you might wonder what people are doing with all this time on their hands. If you are like me, you’re probably at least trying to clear some long-delayed projects off your to-do list. One of those items would entail motorcycle maintenance.

Now, I’m not a guy to really dig into the mechanics of my bikes. I almost never do any more than change the oil and filter. Plus cleaning. Maybe if the weather stays nice now I’ll get around to cleaning my bikes for the first time in, oh, two or three years. But I have spoken with Joel, my mechanic, and he will be putting a new front tire on the Concours sometime soon.

Others amongst you are more inclined to pull the bike apart. And for that you need a shop manual. I have Clymer manuals for my CB750 Custom and my Concours but when I bought the V-Strom I went looking for one and none of the shops I went to had it. So I looked and found one online.

This all comes to mind because last week I got an email from Mark asking if I would be interested in a guest post about a website that provides shop manuals for most any bike at a modest cost. This site is a UK site called RepairBooks.co.uk. I went there and looked it over and figured this could be useful information for at least some of the folks who read this blog.

But I wasn’t thrilled with the post submitted–it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good enough for me–so I figured I would do one on my own. This way they will get the link they want–which helps their Google ranking–and I’ll end up with a post I am satisfied with.

So I did an online search and found all sorts of resources. I very quickly found the Clymer site but this is the highest-price option. You can get an online manual from Clymer but it is only a one-year subscription to their service and it costs $19.95, and not all of their manuals are available online. Rather than do that I would just buy the hard-copy manual for $26.95 (most) or $39.95 (some)–whatever the individual price is.

On the other hand, why pay when you can get it for free? Carl Salter offers manuals in PDF at no cost. I already had a V-Strom manual but it is divided into separate sections, which can be convenient or inconvenient depending on your usage. Salter had a single PDF so I downloaded it and now I have both.

And if I don’t tear into my bikes, why do I even need a manual? Well, sometimes things break or don’t work properly. I use the manuals to try to diagnose the issue. Sometimes I still end up paying someone else to fix it but at least now and then it will be something I can handle myself. As I said above, why pay when you can get it for free?

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker if you have all the tools to work on every Harley ever made, but not any to work on your ol’ lady’s car.