A Shop Manual Farkle

[stateboy_imp]

So it seems the bikes get a lot of accessories and there are a lot to choose from. What I haven't seen is how to accessorize the shop manual (and with the mass volume of threads and comments, I may have missed it). I see many people complain of how the manual won't lay open to a select page. Some put it in a three-ring binder to go along with the pre-punched holes in order to protect it. I started this farkle years ago with some of my other shop and technical manuals. This can be done for about $10 at Staples or OfficeMax or some store of that sort.

I had my shop manual cut off at the spine to the point where the three-hole punch portion was removed. I had the front and back covers laminated with the store's thickest option (they had three to choose from). The next step was to spiral-punch the manual. The last step is to choose the color of the plastic coated spiral wire binding you would like. Unfortunately, due to the size of this manual, they only had black available. Sometimes you can get them in navy blue or red or green. I was looking to get red but it was not available. The result is a manual that will lay flat at any page and can be folded back on itself for a single page to show. What's great about the laminated covers is that they are durable and can easily be wiped clean of any greasy fingerprints.

The downside is for forum users like Nortoon who removed the spine from his manual and placed the loose pages in a 3-ring binder. This allows him to insert additional pages as needed between select manual pages that may offer tricks of the trade learned from other forum members. My spiral-bound version does not offer that option.

The paper towels seen in the pictures were to cover the pages for copyright purposes but still show a portion of the text, photographs and images that bump up against the spiral-bound side of the manual.

Ride safe - Jerry