Big Sky Euro

Here's how my garage has been for the last few days:



Had to remove the stereo and HVAC console to remove the shift assembly:





Ready for the manual shift assembly:



Removed both front axles:



The torque converter has three bolts that need to be removed from the flex plate. Remove the starter, then roatate the crankshaft until each bolt (3x T55) can be removed:



After removing the trans mounts there is enough room to separate the trans from the motor, and with my jack I moved the trans out and down. Then dragged out through the back of the car using the driveline tunnel because I didn't have enough room to clear the trans coming out the front or sides. It was a bit of work, but I got it out. Here's a comparision of the size between the auto (01V) and the manual (01A)





The flex plate:



Flex plate removed, view of the rear main:





Next was to remove the pedal cluster. It wasn't too bad to remove, but there are two tough bolts to remove that hold the brake booster in the engine bay:





Accel pedal swapped to the new pedal cluster:



A view of the empty driveline tunnel so far:



Next is to get the pedal cluster bolted in and get the manual shift assembly installed. Waiting on the seller to find a box for the manual driveline and B5 trans mounts so he can ship them to me. Also waiting on gear and trans fluid, Amsoil

Wow your going to shave like 50lb's. That auto is beefy.

Wow you are cruising through this swap! Kudos!!!

Yeah the auto is way huge and heavy. No time to mess around on this swap

Today I ran the master/slave cylinder hardline and reservoir soft line through the firewall. Luckily there are already grommets there, just needed to be punched through. The top line is the line that runs from the brake res. down to the master cylinder, which feeds it with fluid. The bottom is the hard line that runs from the master to the slave cylinder, via through the bottom of the firewall:



Looking up at the firewall, the hardline:



Getting that done also requires the pedal assembly to go back in:



And after that labourious job was done, I installed the manual shift housing. You can see on the shifter rails, I seem to be missing a couple of bolts I'll need to contact the seller about, plus there's a cover that needs two nuts to secure it (not shown):

Like 45 more minutes and your done right.

Haha yeah, waiting on the seller to ship those other parts. By the time he gets them here to me, I'll be ready to bolt them in hopefully.

What do you do with the ECU and wiring. VSS and Clutch Switch? TCU Signal?

I found some decent resources on this in a thread on Audizine - TCU gets removed/bypassed and a jumper installed, and the clutch switch gets wired into pin #39 on the ECU. VSS is already in place and should be plug and play. VCDS will recode the modules to make it into a manual.

Well thought out! and killer progress! awesome project!

MikeWire wrote:I found some decent resources on this in a thread on Audizine - TCU gets removed/bypassed and a jumper installed, and the clutch switch gets wired into pin #39 on the ECU. VSS is already in place and should be plug and play. VCDS will recode the modules to make it into a manual.

Lol, same thing I did minus the recode.