Welp, the car is up on cribbing blocks now. Ended up modifying the design found at this link: http://www.myturbodiesel.com/1000q/multi/wood-block.htm


Pulling the pedals out went smoothly, but the telescoping steering wheel motor can make for a tight removal:


The pedal frame for the automatic looks similar to the pedal frame for the manual, so if you are attempting a pedal swap, might as well re-use the old pedal frame:


Ended up finding a rubber plug behind the cutout that provided access through the firewall. My guess is this is for the clutch hydraulics so I removed the plug and cleared some room around the sound deadening material. Here is a photo of the cross-hatch in the sound deadening material:


New pedals seem to fit okay. Dirty carpet but it was clean before I got in there and started taking stuff apart!


Grabbed a cell phone photo of the KIllerChiller A/C expansion block hidden behind the front bumper carrier.

 

Fished the feed hose for the clutch master cylinder through the firewall using the correct BMW grommet. Went in easily but had to cut some of the sound deadening out of the way. The hose plugs in to the little nipple hanging off to the right of the reservoir once you cut the tip off.


Extracted the dual exhaust and began unbolting the drive shaft at the rear differential.


The bolts at the front end of the drive shaft at the guibo were difficult to get at with the transmission support beam hardware in place, so stuck the transmission lift underneath, removed the bracing, and was able to get at those bolts a bit easier.


Here's a shot with all the bracing removed


Put the transmission support bracing back in and left it looking like this for now.


A view down the tunnel. No more drive shaft. The two bolts hanging from the top represent the location where the center bearing support was hung.


If you look up, you can see where the manual shifter will be routed through the tunnel.

 

Awesome thread. super jealous about your manual swap, (and supercharger). Would want to attempt this manual swap too, but for my car, it'd probably be more economical to just swap the car.

 

+1 jealous about the manual swap. So far looks pretty straight forward. Just wondering about modules/coding.

Also make sure you change the rear coolant pan/seal while you have the trans out. Not too sure if its the same design on the 4.8's but common problem on 4.4's. Usually goes after coolant transfer pipe from what I've read.

 

Thank you. Yeah, probably more economical to just swap the car unless you've tampered with lots of other stuff.

Me too which is why I have decided it makes sense to start figuring some of the electrical stuff sooner than later... at least enough to get the car started and on the road. Will deal with getting it re-coded once the car is on the road, if possible.

Unplugged the transmission cable harness from the transmission and verified that the car would not start without the transmission cable harness connected. Going to leave it disconnected for now and try to get the car started without the harness.

Picked up the clutch pedal switch. It's a hall effect sensor that mounts alongside the clutch master cylinder. It accepts a plug fitted with 4 wires and there was no plug of this sort on the factory (automatic) harness. Got lucky and Michael at BMW Seattle found one that appears to work. Problem is that it only had two wires sticking out of it.


Popped a small screwdriver in the plug and released the two wires from their home.


Found some of these breadboard prototyping jumper cables sitting around. They appeared to be the correct size for the clutch pedal switch plug, so removed the wires from their plugs and fitted them to the plug for the clutch pedal switch.


Appears to fit okay.


Cracked open the housing for the DME so a lead could be routed to the clutch pedal sensor. Here is where it gets a little interesting. The BMW service manual (I believe it's Bentley?) has the wiring schematic wrong here. They state that this car has the clutch pedal sensor run to pin 18 on the DME but wds online states that it should be pin 23. Verified the existence of other wires on the same connector and they were consistent with what wds online states so just went with that. Pulled the second connector from the right when looking at the DME from the front of the car.


Using a screwdriver, you can release the sockets from the plug. Notice there is no wire connected on location 23.


Ended up soldering up something to do the job and plugged that in to pin location 23. The wire clicked in perfectly.


Attached the connector back on the DME and routed the clutch pedal sensor wire with some other red wires that were run underneath the cabin filter area, then in to the firewall.


Still have to wire up power, ground, and CAS to the clutch pedal sensor but felt good to get this part out of the way. It was the longest run (from what I have been able to gather at this point). I figure the rest of the wiring should be pretty straightforward.

 

I believe the current wiring goal is this:


Added wires to pins 41 and 3 on the CAS connector as seen in the photos below. Pin location 41 was already occupied with a wire that connected to the automatic transmission. I simply clipped the wire and re-used the existing pin clip for it and wired it to the clutch switch module:


At this point the the wires were just hanging in the footwell space but I was so eager to discover if the wiring I installed would actually get the car running that I jumpered the wires over to the clutch switch module, grabbed my key and attempted to start the car. The car did not start. Didn't even turn over. My guess is that the CAS was interfering with the start-up sequence because the only thing I could see on the display was a key icon and then the car would power off after a second or two. Double-checked the wiring and noticed that the ground wire to the clutch switch module fell off the bolt that I had temporarily grounded it to (was using alligator clips). Tried to start the car again and then got a 'Engine Failure' message on the dash and the car electronics would stay on a few seconds longer and then power off. After going over everything in my head for a good 15 minutes I considered that this idea of retrofitting a manual transmission might not work afterall and that this was all one big bad idea. Then I figured it was worth double checking the pins in the DME housing to make sure none of them were bent. Opened up the DME housing and inspected each pin...all pins looked fine. Got under the car and looked for connectors that might need to be connected and found a large grounding strap by the transmission that was hanging. I strapped that back on to the chassis and left the automatic wiring harness laying against the tunnel still disconnected. Also forgot to plug the two upstream o2 sensors back in so made sure those were plugged in. Hopped back in the car and gave it another shot. This is what happened:


Pulled the center console out. Used a torx to release the manual shifter from it's home (3 screws). Disconnected the linkage from the side of the autobox and pulled everything out. Pretty straightforward.

 

Thats mean it is impossible to convert to transmission from auto to manual?

 

The fact that the car starts without any wiring from the shifter or automatic transmission is a good thing... it means the car should start when the manual transmission is installed as well.

 

Removed the drain cap on the transmission. Drained as much fluid out as possible. Then removed the transmission fluid cooler lines and pushed those aside.


Removed the rubber cover to access the flywheel bolts. Rotated the crank to gain access to each of the four bolts and removed them one by one.


I didn't get many photos in this stage because some of the bolts were really hard to get at let alone get photos of. Removed each of the bolts around the bell housing and pulled the transmission out. There were a couple bolts on the drivers side that had nuts behind the bolts . These were a pain to remove. Ended up unbolting the steering knuckle and pushing the steering column up toward the cabin area to make barely enough room to insert a wrench on to the nuts. Also had to pull the passenger side collector off of the header to make it easier to pull the transmission out. Ended up rolling the transmission over roughly 30-35 degrees while still in the tunnel then dropped it out slowly. The thing is heavy.


Anyone looking to purchase a lightly used automatic transmission?

 

waiting for further progress~