How we write our repair guides

Three things stand behind our guides: manufacturer service documentation, standard workshop practice, and our own service experience. When a value or a procedure comes from manufacturer documentation, we read that documentation and restate it in our own words. We never reproduce manual text or artwork, on any page, for any brand, our own included. Every diagram we publish is original, drawn from first principles in our house style, so what you are looking at is our explanation of how a system works, not a copy of someone else's. Where sources disagree, or a figure genuinely varies between models, we say so and give the range along with the reason, instead of picking a number because it looks clean. A value we cannot verify does not appear.

The Hawke Electric Vehicles Service Team writes every guide, and every guide is checked before it is published. Nothing goes out generated and unread. Each guide shows a visible last-reviewed date, and that date moves only when the content changes in substance: a corrected value, a revised procedure, a newly added cause. Dates are never touched to look fresh. When a guide says it was reviewed on a given day, the material was genuinely worked on that day.

Guides get revised in three situations. When a procedure changes, because a manufacturer revises a component or our own workshop practice moves on. When readers report that something is wrong, unclear or incomplete through the feedback widget on every guide; those reports are read and acted on. And when our engineers learn something new in the field that belongs on the page, such as a cause appearing more often than the guide suggests or a check that saves time. Corrections come before additions, and a substantive revision moves the visible last-reviewed date.

Some of this work carries real risk, and the guides are written with that in view. Battery packs can deliver dangerous current, and a tool dropped across the terminals can weld and burn. Charging lead-acid batteries produces hydrogen gas, which can ignite in an enclosed space, so charging areas need ventilation. A vehicle being worked on must sit on jack stands, never on a jack alone. Every guide that involves these risks says so at the point where the risk arises, and any guide that reaches the limits of safe DIY work says so plainly and points to professional help. If a guide takes you to that limit, send us the details through our support request form.

At the end of every guide we ask whether it fixed the problem. Collected page by page, those answers show us which guides do their job and which need rewriting, and they decide what we improve next. If a guide let you down, saying so through the widget is genuinely helpful, because it moves that page to the front of the revision queue. We read what comes in, and the guides improve because of it.