Helm Manual Confusion

Discussion in 'General Motoring' started by Dick, Mar 14, 2007.

  1. Dick

    Dick Guest

    I wanted to order the service manual for my 2003 Accord EX V-6 with
    Navigation. I went to the Helm site, and the order descriptions were
    very confusing. I even called them, and am more confused.

    It seems there are multiple service manuals and multiple service
    manual supplements. The difference being that there is for example a
    service manual for the 2003, another for the 2003 & 2004, another for
    the 2003, 2004 & 2005 and one for the 2003, 2004, 2005 & 2006. In
    some cases these multi-year manuals are less expensive than a single
    year manual.

    My question is why would a person not want to buy the latest
    multi-year manual instead of the single year manual? Right now I am
    only interested in the model year 2003, but I might have one of the
    others some day. Do these multi-year manuals have less and/or
    abbreviated information for each year? The order person at Helm
    couldn't answer that question.
     
    Dick, Mar 14, 2007
    #1
  2. Dick

    Tegger Guest


    The various issues were released as cars came to market. Generally
    speaking, you want the latest one available, as this one will have all
    updates and corrections missing from the originals.

    "Supplements" are issued for correction of mistakes and updates that were
    not available when the original manual was written. It is useful to have
    these.

    Unfortunately I also do not know if the multi-year manuals leave out some
    info found in the single-year ones. One question to ask Helm is how many
    pages are in the various versions. I would think this would be a good proxy
    for how much information there is.
     
    Tegger, Mar 16, 2007
    #2
  3. Dick

    dold Guest

    The change from ULEV to SULEV resulted in a "supplement" for the 2003 Civic
    that had almost as many pages as the original. I couldn't decide if it was
    a re-issue. I bought the non-supplement version.
    Don't they list the page counts?
    http://www.helminc.com
    That was how I decided which one to get ;-)
    It looks like they have a generic "average 1500 pages" now.
    Mine's fat, but I don't think it's 1500 pages.
     
    dold, Mar 16, 2007
    #3
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