DIY Help / New Cyclepedia Service Manual For Honda CRF300L And CRF300 Rally

Aug 31, 2023

Cyclepedia's new CRF300L manual will help you keep your bike on the road without expensive dealership help. Photo: Zac Kurylyk

Looking to wrench on your Honda CRF300L or CRF300 Rally yourself? If you want to go DIY, not dealership, then Cyclepedia has what you’ll need: A service manual.

This is excellent news for many riders. Once upon a time, all popular motorcycles in the market had third-party manuals available as alternatives to expensive or unobtainable factory service manuals. If you were an independent moto mechanic, you likely had a shelf full of them at your shop. If you were a self-sufficient motorcyclist, you would buy one of these books from Chilton, Haynes, Clymer or other publishers to give you basic torque specs and other maintenance details along with detailed teardown and rebuild instructions, and wiring diagrams. But over the past 20 years, these books have started to disappear. Back in 2020, Haynes said it would publish no new-model manuals, and we see similar apathy from other publishers.

With that in mind, it’s good to see the new book from Cyclepedia. It is intended to address maintenance on the 2021-2023 CRF300 series, but as long as the models remain relatively unchanged, no doubt it will be applicable for future models as well. Cyclepedia previously printed a manual (or published it online) for the CRF250L series, so this book was a logical next-step, and no doubt much if it was a simple copy-paste operation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and an all-new book is much better than the old standard practice of adding a few tersely-worded pages at the back to address series updates, and leaving the owner to sort it out themselves from there.

At only $32 right now, this manual will easily pay for itself for the DIYer.

Cyclepedia actually sent me a copy of this manual, and here’s what I can tell you about it, with the printed version in my hands:

When you purchase the printed book, you also get a free one-year subscription to Cyclepedia’s online manual for the CRF300 series. That’s helpful if you’re on the road and you want access to service information without having to tote the bulky book!

See more details on the manual, or order it, here. Right now, Cyclepedia is selling it for $32 to US customers, which is considerably cheaper than a lot of the shop manuals of old. Again, without actually testing the book against a CRF300-series dual sport or ADV, I can’t tell you for sure if this book is a must-buy, but if I had one of these Hondas and I wanted to wrench on it myself, I would certainly be purchasing this book. The first time you use it to avoid a trip to a shop, it’s paid for itself.