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Built a free tool that answers CB750 questions straight from the factory manual.

ShopdogAI

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Hey everyone. Kiril, from Toronto. I've built a vintage motorcycle repair tool that helps folks work on their bikes, and it's completely free right now. The SOHC CB750 is one of the bikes it covers deepest, which is why I'm posting here.

Here's how it works: every manual gets broken into pieces, page by page, each tagged with the bike, the year range, and the page number. Those pieces get indexed by meaning rather than keyword, which is why "bike won't charge" finds a section titled "Charging System Inspection." When you ask something, it works out which bike and system you mean, pulls the handful of pages most likely to hold the answer, and only then does the AI get involved, and its job is narrow: read those specific pages and tell you what they say, with the page cited. It cannot answer from its own memory. If the pages don't have it, the answer is "the manual doesn't cover this" instead of a guess.

Accuracy is my number one concern because I'm building this for my own bike too, and during my extensive testing I'm getting 99% accuracy across a wide variety of motorcycles. This took months to actually get right and I'd love to hear what some folks think.

Here's a sample cam chain tensioner adjustment answer on a '75 CB750K: https://beta.shopdogai.com/a/xhgwkswcak

The 750 coverage runs the SOHC years, 1969 to 78, K bikes and the F included. It's strongest on stock configurations because it works off FSMs, so pod filters, aftermarket carbs, and PO wiring specials are where it's weakest, and it says so.

It's free right now (no credit card required): https://beta.shopdogai.com/?utm_source=cb750com and if the mods are open to it, I'll set up a code so anyone from here keeps founder pricing permanently when paid plans eventually exist.

Use it to diagnose a stalled project, find the right torque spec, consolidate repair steps for a complex fix, or just try to break it. I built this myself, solo, so I'd love to hear what you think, and especially what it gets wrong. I'll also do my best to give back to the forum by using it to answer 750 questions as folks post them.
 

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Hi Kiril,

Did you use ai to write your post? It reads a little ai-ish. I don't really know how to feel about this whole project. It could be great, but I'm also skeptical. Ai is scraping and slowly killing forums, and your tool, which I assume you hope to eventually profit from, will contribute to the same thing. Don't you think ai will keep improving to a point where your tool won't be necessary? Couldn't a well-designed prompt saying "only use the service manual as a reference and state any uncertainties" take care of most questions? If everyone uses your tool for technical questions, will this forum die? As you can probably tell, I have a love-hate relationship with ai.
 
Hey Travis, I wrote the post but I got AI to fill in some of the details which is where I'm guessing parts of it reads like AI. I've made a change to my original post and deleted the AI bits... I agree it sounded a bit weird.

In terms of your concerns: I didn't use any forums to scrape information. I went out and bought all of the factory service manuals myself to add to Shopdog. I actually don't see Shopdog replacing forums at all... it might reduce the amount of basic repair questions that are posted but it won't be able to replace connecting with folks who like the same bikes. The Factory Service manual doesn't replace forums, if anything Shopdog might reduce the amount of Factory Service Manuals bought by a small margin but that's about it. I completely get the love-hate relationship with AI. Almost everyone I've talked to has said the same thing. I would think of Shopdog as more of a database that something is connected to vs. an LLM trained on thousands of forum posts.

Even with a well designed prompt it's impossible to get the same accuracy as Shopdog consistently... any LLM would struggle to accurately piece together multiple pieces of information accurately and without hallucinations. It might be able to get you a torque spec but it won't be able to help with the more complicated repair questions.

Again, I really don't see Shopdog taking over forum usage... It's great for summarizing multiple pages of a factory service manual but it won't have the tips and tricks that a forum has.
 
I threw a 10 or so questions at this tonight. Most of it seemed to be pretty accurate to the shop manual. I submitted a couple of feedback items. Let me know if you want more feedback. I think it's a pretty good tool. It's a reference. Part of me wishes it included specific page references along with the responses, although I did not include that in my feedback.
 
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