I have a Deere 2016 310 L backhoe. Thought that a service manual would be useful, so I called my dealer. They referred me to www.johndeeretechinfo.com I keyed in the part number - TM13294x19, and a listing came up. $746 for a printed copy!!!! That's worse than college course books. Talk about financial sodomy. They do call it John Deere service.
Cheaper than a field service call.
That printed copy took 4 full grown trees running through the pulp mill. Everyone that had anything to do with it from start to finish got paid.
Print on demand or download price is a little less than half of that.
I get it, but I've not seen book sticker shock like that since college. Funny how everyone talks about how expensive it is to keep a Lambo or Ferrari. They really should talk about the cost of keeping heavy equipment. We need boys hanging posters on their bedroom walls of supermodels, draping themselves over backhoes, loaders and dozers.
I hope you thought about that before you bought it. Wait until you want a paper version of a Cat manual. They start at North of $1000.......... Of course nobody generally buys paper versions these days. It's either pdf on a CD or a direct download. Still about half the price of a paper one though. Even better is a login to the online system that is available 24/7. Look at it this way. If a dealer tech costs $150/hr and is on the clock from the time he leaves the shop to the time he gets back $750 might get you between 2-3 hours of actual work out of him provided you live relatively close. So the first time you use that manual it's paid for itself right then & there. Also look at the manual as an investment that you could sell separately at some future date if you ever sold the machine and, based on eBay prices for used paper manuals, you could probably ask the same or even more than you originally paid for it.
That machine was close to $100,000.00 when new and today is still valued at over $50,000.00. It seems to me that anyone who can afford that should be able to afford $750.00 to keep it maintained. I do heavy equipment repair and I buy myself a manual for every machine that my customers buy so that I have as much information possible when I get called to work on them. I've paid as much as $1500.00 for a paper manual, and that was close to 20 years ago.
Well, compared to the manual cost for my $90,000 Lexus, it’s a lot.
I thought or was told a lexus doesn't need repairs.
It’s actually true. Not much goes wrong with them.
I’ve been told the same thing about 310 Ls. That aside from the exhaust cleanup system, all of the bugs have been worked out.
I have never read any comments in regards to the human effort and the untold hours that is required to create those service manuals. It makes sense to me why they are so expensive. Consider the illustrations in parts books and the parts lists that accompany them. I think we are lucky that we have access to them.
That's why I don't let my competition set my bid pricing and get a chuckle out of GC's and Owners that ask "Why does this cost so much!". More time than I can remember our knowledgable Members here on HEF have cautioned newbies about the costs associated with owning and operating heavy equipment when the generic "I want to buy a dozer for my property but I don't have any experience" thread comes up. Some take the advice and some do not, the results are varied to say the least. This is my take on hiring out mechanical work that is in the same lane as hiring someone to do land improvement or other excavating services on their property. Our company makes money on tearing down buildings, moving earth and putting pipe in the ground - not fixing heavy equipment. A good dependable mechanic is worth gold just like a good dependable site work contractor. If I wanted to make money repairing equipment I would open a HE repair shop. Just an example but I would be foolish to take a crew that could earn $300-400 an hour doing what they do in the field and put them wrenching on a machine to save $150 per hour the mechanic charges. The $$ just doesn't make sense. In my opinion I think a lot of the do it yourself types could save a lot of money, frustration and time hiring out the work instead of buying a piece of yellow scrap iron and do it themselves. However every man has the right to go to hell in their own fashion.
Well, if you can afford to spend $90,000.00 on a car then $675.00 on a manual seems cheap. If you look on the Deere site again there are several options. The "best" manual has color fold out schematics ect., the POD is the same manual with each schematic printed on individual pages, no color, then there's the CD version or the download. The last few years I've been buying the download version, I have it within the hour, I put it on a CD and bring it to my local printer and within a day have a printed version. Now I have it on my computer, on CD and in print.
Probably the same thing , but I use the John Deere Bookstore. You can purchase just the electrical schematics for your machine and get it on the spot.
I didn't spend $90,000 on a car. I bought it used. And you don't get the ability to spend $90,000 on a car by wasting money unnecessarily. Well, some people enjoy working on things. I know that I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about this machine, doing as much of the maintenance by myself (I did hire out the seal replacement), and setting it up the way that I want. In fact, despite the challenges, I've enjoyed this project more than any other so far, and I actually love heading out to feed animals in the morning and gazing at Annabelle Grace. And American farmers are so upset over the monopoly these heavy equipment companies have over the maintenance monopoly and price power on their machines that they are turning to Ukrainian software to crack the Deere prohibitions on do it yourself maintenance. I'm not saying that this is a good idea, but I'm not the only one questioning costs associated with this stuff. And it's not nickel and dime stuff. I bought all of my fluids and filters from the local dealer. Getting quality stuff for a few dollars more made more sense than risking buying junk off the web. It's the $1000 for wheel spacers, and $5000 to change a seal that seems excessive.
The big problem with factory service is the small guy that has one or two pieces of equipment rarely gets one of the top service techs. So very often that small guy ends up paying a high hourly rate to train a new tech or gets one that isn't good enough to send out to big customers. Hell I've gotten into thing way over my head because service department is backed up weeks or months and have bin asked to do the best I can and give it a shot and so far it's worked out good for me and my costumers. In the end a good factory service tech just can not be beat but a poor one has to be the most frustrating thing to deal with. Back to the subject.... If you thing about it in terms of nobody thinks twice about putting a grand in the fuel tank or paying an operator to run the machine for a few days, the service manual is a bargain!
You don't get a service manual with your Lexus. You get a little bit of an operation manual that tells you to contact your dealer when something goes wrong. As far as the Deere repair stuff and the farmers go, it is my impression that the farmers want the ability to short circuit all the emissions stuff at their discretion. From what little I've seen in the Deere side of construction equipment, they have followed Komatsu on including all the diagnostics in the machine now. What they don't give you is the source code and actually no one gives you that on anything. They certainly are not going to give out information that government regulators will use as a club to beat up the manufacturer. My take on the complaints about service manual prices is pretty straight forward. People complained about those prices when I entered the business some fifty years ago. It's no different now. A $50 book back then equates to something around $300 to $500 or more today. It's just the price of having big iron. If you can't afford the manual, then you can't afford the iron.
As I don't have anything that runs on diesel I have no idea what off-road diesel costs but just going by the on-highway price around here which I believe is about $3.30 a gallon and the capacity of the tank of a 310 L being around 125 gallons one tank is around $412.00
34 gallons. I pay $2.80 a gallon. Just looked up the manual for an F150. Close to $300. Guess they got expensive.
Now this is worth a discussion, they shrank the container and still the same price.
One of my son's called me from work one day about a year ago, told me to sit down, so I did, then said and I quote "the idiot in charge [parts department] threw away all the paper service/parts manuals". At first I laughed and said, yea right, now what's up, he was dead serious, three huge dumpsters full of paper manuals got thrown out and hauled to the landfill?? For every machine they've ever worked on, from the most obsolete to the newest model made, everything was tossed out, only the manuals my son had in his truck were left. So began the argument of "where do we get a new service manual for a 40-60 year old machine that's obsolete" and NOT on PDF anywhere and that company no longer exists but we still fix and service those machines?? So if you think 700 something bucks is bad, try a service manual for a few million dollar crane on for size once, it makes a grand look really cheap really fast. I'm not sure how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in manuals were tossed out, nobody seems to even be able to come up with a figure, but I do know, they've been buying back new manuals that they can. There are days you really have to wonder, exactly who is doing the thinking and exactly how much thinking are they really doing.
I’ve done appraisals for million dollar cranes in the past. The operator manuals are bigger than the parts and services manuals put together. At any rate the writing now is on the screen. Paper books are an extra cost most owners don’t wish to pay for.
They don’t think. That is part of the entire problem with people.
In order to track down wiring gremlins, its nice to lay all the pages out end to end, so you can trace everything through from point A to point B, with it on the crane screen or a computer screen, you can view one page at a time, then usually either the computer and or crane screen is tied up not allowing you to do multiple things at once while trouble shooting the problem at hand. With paper you can also photocopy certain pages, to enlarge or reduce them to make seeing things easier, then you only have to take those pages up into the crane and if they get damaged, toss them away when done, after all they are only photocopies. Any copier place can make whatever you want whatever size you want, through the crane computer screen, if you can even get that to light up and work, your pretty limited on what you can send or do, if that's down, your pretty much SOL and dead in the water. Paper is still nice to have, even as a backup system, there are times nothing can replace it.
I don't disagree with you at all. But the factories will not pay a publishing company to print books anymore. You are going to be stuck with a digital copy and have to print it out on your own. You are not wrong at all. The way we do things is changing and at this point there isn't any leverage to force them to keep making paper books and giving them out as part of a sale.
The owner or sales dealership won't be given manuals, haven't for a long time now, but certain manufacturers will upon request, still print out the manuals for a fee, very steep fee, but will still do it, otherwise you have to hire someone, like a copy place to print them off for you [not real sure that's exactly legal] but certain places will do it, that's how you get a paper version, they'll also laminate pages so when your working in the rain, the pages stay usable.
I used to get that done and time at Kinko. I don't know if they are even still around anymore. We would give them a disk and a list of the pages we wanted and the sizes we wanted them in. Every place had at least one of those large engineering print machines.
Several years ago United Rentals took over a local rental house and they did the same thing, only they dumped used motor oil on them first so that no one would be tempted to take them out of the dumper. They also took diagnostic tools and hit them with a hammer a few times before throwing them away. A bunch of brain dead people.
It's legal if you are not doing it for resale, even copy righted manuals. Even so there are some places that won't do it for that reason.
I like paper and usually have a manual for anything I'm working on. Several times I've had to have the dealer come out and when they see my paper manual they usually put their laptop away.
You have more money than I do FL.
I’ve probably put another 10k into the unit with what I’ve done. Add $5k for the Deere piece. I do the maintenance. It’s just another $750 out of pocket after a huge outflow.
It sucks, I know. I bought a Deere 310A about 7 years ago and within 40 hours of run time, I lost a main hydraulic pump. I sucked it up, bought a 40 year old service manual, and got it fixed. I have manuals for every piece of equipment I own now, and it helps when it comes time to fix or troubleshoot something.
I also have paper service manuals for about everything I own, I figured a couple hours of service calls pays for them and I then own them forever and have access to them whenever I want. I view a manual as just another part to buy that's needed to keep the machine running.
Kinko's was bought out by Fedex. Now the Fedex store does copying including the large blue print size in addition to shipping at the same location. I prefer Staples because of the relationship with the print manager and they are cheaper than Fedex by $1 or so a sheet for 24x36.
This idiocy must be endemic to United Rentals because a couple years ago we hired one of their former employees and he tried throwing away stuff out of our toolroom because he had no idea what it was.
I have my Cat 3406, 3406E, C15 manuals. The company bought the Series 60 which those are on line in PDF. But I have my Eaton transmission manuals which are old and very hard to get. Any of my manuals I don't loan because either you won't get them back or if you do there covered in grease.
It's your business majors out of college who were taught by professors who have never worked in any industry. If it can't be used tomorrow, then get rid of it. When you see it happening, you might offer a couple of bucks for each book. If you have a place to store them, they might become valuable to someone someday.
Another vote for paper... I bought Deere downloads, Then printed them out on my home computer laser printer. Luckily, it's a duplex (prints both sides) Even so, I have to limit the printing to 100 pages (50 sheets) or the printer gets too hot. I find tracing circuits easier on paper than multiple computer screens. I lose track on the screen, whereas I put my finger on the page while I look at the next sheet. I'm old and can't remember S...t... you know CRS syndrome
I do that to. I end up using a pencil and ruler most of the time because my eyes are getting so bad with the small lines. I plan on finding a pair of 4X reading glasses in the near future for it.
Some of us blind bats just have the pages enlarged 5 times and forget the glasses completely, then use, [heaven forbid] scotch tape to tape the pages together so they continue on for the full harness to be viewed at one time. I'll have to admit, not one single time in all the years I've worked on machines, did the batteries go dead on a paper manual so I couldn't view it in the field, lol.
I found guy in Russia online that had a plethora of manuals for about $20.00 each download. I got a factory Hyster manual for my H110E, Case 1845C, Case 780CK, and a couple for Detroit Diesel. All manuals were Parts, Service & Maintenance, and Overhaul. These are all factory service manuals. Once I had the links, they were downloaded, stored, and printed at leisure. I think that's the way to do it and not have to store a lot of paper copies. I usually print off only what I need and don't worry about the greasy shop atmosphere. I went looking and cannot locate him nowadays but I'll keep trying.
The moral of the story is, before laying down the thousands of $$$$$ for any sort of high cost item, demand the shop manual be included. Personally I can't stand a computerized manual of any sort, too slow finding a page you want, and can't have it laying open to look at it. Oh the good old days with high quality photos and not just a line drawing of the part your working on. In those days the proud manufacture was thrilled to do more advertising of their quality products by producing a quality shop manual. If all the manufactures would stop redesigning or ruining a good design and instead put that money into customer service like a quality shop manual they would again gain respect of the people that keep them all employed.
I agree with most of your post but "high quality photos" in a service manual? The best manuals that I've used were the Cat service manuals of the sixties and seventies and that was only because of the quality of their descriptions. All the photos were black and white grainy fifth and sixth generation block prints taken with too little light and crappy resolution so poor that many times you had no clue as to what they were showing. The Japanese made great line drawings but explained things in engineer speak that had been translated to English. The Europeans wrote manuals and did the same types of pictures as Cat but left out so many details that tearing something apart was like being blind folded and dropped in the woods and left to find your own way out. They would build something and then modify it twelve times and never update any of the manuals. That's if you got a book from them in the first place. A lot of times they are just shrunken copies of the engineering prints. These days I'm just happy to get any information at all from any manufacturer. Most of the time I expect to be disappointed.
and now Cat has the same crappy photos uploaded on SIS. Newer stuff MIGHT be better but usually isn’t unless they start showing 3D cad drawings then it’s usually better. And the descriptions have gotten a lot worse. And now they’ve really made it bad and gone to pictographs for the newer stuff that you have to have a legend like a map to decipher that is the most infuriating of it all.
The last cat manual I used they mixed up the metric and SAE data, meaning 250 newton meters ended up being printed 250 foot lbs, quite a difference in torque specs when it all said and done. I got so upset over the deal I traded off the machine and tossed the manual in the trash, simple way to solve that issue entirely. I'll second that whole needing a road map to even read the manual thing. Its pretty bad when I have to call to ask someone else, "hey where is the section on engine removal located at in the manual" did they stick it under or along with fan belt removal or tire rotation?? The computer versions I use sticky notes to remember where stuff is located at and under what heading and it usually takes a few hours to study the thing to ever find what I need, then sticky notes to the computer screen to know what section and page the thing is I need.
I think part of the difficulty is that the people who create the manuals don’t actually work on the machines, and as a result, don’t realize what should be included.
The manuals are written when the machine was built, or as they are built, then once those machines are in the field being used and needing repairs. With the modern age technology of computers and cell phones, most techs can access anything they need while right in the field, directly to the manufacturer and get an answer back almost immediately when the manual is either wrong, or incomplete. Once a mistake is noted in the manual, that update is given to those answering the questions in tech support, not updating the manuals. So after a dozen years later and once out of warranty, and the rest of us idiots buy these machines and try to fix them and work on them ourselves, or work on a different brand of machine we don't have a franchise for, tech support is almost nonexistent and the manuals are so lacking its not funny. Very poor manuals are another way to require OEM to continue to work on the machines they sold. Now this all depends on the manufacturer, some are very good at providing tech support, others are so bad, to say they suck is an understatement and every area of the country and world is different. As they say color sells many machines, the support and service sells far more, and that's dealership dependent. So when some brands sell great in one area and nobody will even consider that brand in another, it gets down to the service side of the equation, and yes service manuals are part of that equation. Lately [I've done it many times] I ask to see a service manual for a machine I'm considering buying, if nobody can provide one for me to even look at and read, chances are I'm not going to buy that machine no matter how good of deal they intend to give me. Thats because I'm going to be the one who ends up fixing it myself at some point down the road and I want to know, when I do buy a used/new machine I can also buy a descent service manual that does me some good. I've pretty much weeded out the manufacturers who manuals suck and tech support is nonexistent, you know, being told to just call the local dealers and have them fix it, constitutes tech supports that sucks in my opinion, but since that changes from year to year, I also need to know who's getting better and who's getting worse.