Honda Car Forum

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.

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Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Dick <w6ccd@k7yca.org> wrote in news:b6igv21bpibf92hcnm613tsaofvgaev31g@
4ax.com:

> 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.
>


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

The Unofficial Honda/Acura FAQ
www.tegger.com/hondafaq/

Tegger <tegger@tegger.c0m> wrote:
> "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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley Lake, CA, USA GPS: 38.8,-122.5