Found a source for repair manuals!!
 

Many of us have been fighting to find a service manual for our cars, well, some of the hard to find manuals now have a home. Go to this link to see if your hard to find manual is available from this place in Maryland.

www.tmcpubl.com

For a reference, my 1990 420SEL has 5 available manuals all original style from Germany (or so the guy said over the phone, still haven't seen them in person) and yes, these are paperback with one exception.

Chassis and Body $125
Engine $85
Auto Climate Control $75
Electrical $75
Tranny (only on microfiche) $65

If anybody out there has these already, I would be interested to hear their thoughts on the quality and content of the books. Are they worth buying?

Those are factory manuals and they're staggeringly overpriced. You can pick up a CD-ROM that contains ALL of those books for a small fraction of what they are charging.

Ron,

Do you have some experience with the CD version? I have heard that they are not very complete. I don't need a lot of detail as my level of experience is pretty good, but I do need some information.

Thanks. :)

A single CD contains the exact information as all of the books you mentioned. There is no difference in content.

I'll second what German Star just said. The M103 Engine manual is identical to what's on the corresponding CD-Rom.

Buy the CD - more bang for the buck.

The cd's are a better deal, but after seeing the w123 version compared to my paperbacks, I'd not trade the books for anything, even a laptop in the garage, which I've done. The photos in the book are dark and fuzzy enough without haveing been scanned into a .pdf. There both nice to have, but I'd pay those prices for hardcopys. Just my opinion..

The cd is my opinion is a pita. I'll gladly pay extra for the hard copy. I have talked to Jeff at tmc and he seems like a real nice guy. They are selling their manuels cheaper than you can get a used one on ebay. Let me know if you order and how you like it.

don't count the CDs out - read this
 

You can print out anything from the CD but IMHO the CD's blow chow.

I'd pay 10X the cost for the original shop manuals - and I have noticed an increase in the prices of original shop manuals since MB stopped printing them.

I'm going to try StarTek on of these days - I've heard is way better than the CD's but it does not contain alot of info on the older models.

How can one be great while the other is terrible? They're identical. If you don't like the pics on your monitor, just print them out.

Sometimes changing the size of the PDF on screen (like 125% or 75% - try different zoom values) will help make them more readable. As mentioned, usually printing on a postscript printer will also get good results.

To make the CD Service Manuals easier to use, I've made some HTML Indexes that make it easier to navigate around in the CDs.

They can be found here:
<Indexes>

Model 107, Model 116, Model 123, Model 124 and Model 126 availabe.

I too prefer printed manuals. They're a lot easier and quicker to flip through. Printing what you need from the CD manual is the economical way to go. The more expensive printed manuals are for the people who don't want to be bothered by having to print the pages.