Thats cuz you arent as cool as the rest of us....er, wait a sec.

Just to start this off, just a shot of a nifty find at the junkyards....



A brand new(used) hoodliner. It was luckily poorly glued on and didnt take much to remove it. Theres some 3M stuff thats supposedly "da bomb" for gluing things like this on and has a high heat tollerance. Ill admit, i kinda rushed things a bit and used a contact cement from DAP. It did say that it should withstand up to 200deg, so Im hoping itll manage with the underhood heat and not loosen its grip on the liner.


Ok so heres the final push to get the car running. First...wiring.

Forcedinduction...Thanks for the PDFs of the 240s wiring diagrams. That along with charmalu lending me his shop manuals made me realize that I should have kept up a bit more on electrical engineering classes. But all was not lost, I stopped being dense for a second and realized that I had all the blueprints for the rewiring in my hand.....the automatic transmissions neutral safety switch.

PS....As I figured the color scheme on my car is dissimilar that that in this example. The colors on the safety switch on my car were... Brown, Brown/Yellow, White, Red/Black/Yellow. With that, I pulled the safety switch off the side of the auto transmission and cracked it open(rivets mean nothing to a man with a power drill). This is what I mapped out..



Its actually a pretty simple rotary switch. Two switches actually, one activated at park the other activated as the shift lever is moved to the reverse position. Both switches are independent of one another. Basically, all I needed was a splice to the reverse light switch on the shifter and a jumper wire for the ignition/park switch enabling the car to start.

Cake.

I dont like splicing unless its absolutely going to be a permanent thing. I also like reverse compatability so I tend to use connectors for stuff. Who knows...in a drunken stupor I might decide to go back to the automatic.....yeah I know, pretty unlikely, but Im trying to justify my excessive work over just doing some butt splices and crimp connectors

Here is what I whipped up.



One has plugs for the reverse lights and one (one on the left)is for the ignition. I made it a bit long as I might finagle something with the clutch ignition switch one day. Right now there is no clutch override ignition setup and I dont really see that as a problem, but maybe one day Ill do something with it. Right now its just a really long jumper wire. The male portions are actually modified from stock. I needed the pins closer together so that they would fit into the original Neutral safety switch plug.

Like so...



I pulled the NSS plug from its place in the transmission tunnel and brought it inside the cab. Its now sitting in the kick panel to the drivers right foot. If I need to change the wiring its easily accessable. Parking brake light connectors transfer over so thats easy.

FYI: on the passenger side of the transmission tunnel there is a single wire that goes to the transmission and the kickdown switch thats under the gas pedal. In general its unused and doesnt need to connected/grounded or anything. I tucked it away and left it at that.

There were still some mechanical bits that needed to be sorted...like installing the transmission.

This went impossibly smoothly. Lie on back, lift transmission on chest, reverse crawl under car, lift transmission(damn its light) and affix on the back of the engine. No seriously...it was just as "hard" as what I described and took about as long as well. The crappy clutch alignent tool does in fact work....its still crappy though.

I installed new driveshaft donuts and bolts, got them installed as well. This took a bit of effort as the splines of the 240D front/300D rear were really tight. A mini-sledge and a block of wood helped to get things fitted.

Nice and lined up with the balancing marks. New boot on the splnes as well.



Modified transmission brace.



There have been a couple other methods of using the 240D brace. Going diagonal, cutting and rewelding...I got this post Manual Transmission Conversion Vibration - A Solutions from charmalu detailing alternate mounts. I found that you can get the brace perpendicular to the rear transmission mount and have the hole on the passenger side match up with the existing hole in the tunnel. It will still be very much off on the drivers side, but the brace does overlap an existing screw hole there as well. So I opted for using the stock mount hole on the passenger side and redrilling a new hole on the drivers side.

Doing so meant that there would be a pretty sizable air gap between the chassis and the outside of the brace where the but would be seated(the stock holes are flat to flat). I didnt like that too much as its possible that, with nothing to support the underside, over time the motions of the engine/transmission may compress that air gap a bit and then there would be a bit of slop, maybe a loss of tension on the bolt, bolt falls out, trans gets loose, mayhem ensues.

I used 2 of the thick washers that the factory uses in the stock location under the brace to eliminate that air gap and another on the outside of the brace. I needed a longer bolt to span that gap..I used an M10x1.5 turbo manifold stud from my other car(mazda). I figure a grade 10.9 turbo manifold stud will probably be strong enough in this application.

Shifter linkages.




They all clear and dont interfere with each other. It took a couple attemtps to get them set to the right adjustment. Its a little easier to do this while the driveshaft is out so you have enough space, but Im not that smart and did it the harder way.

I prebent the reverse shifter away from the trans tunnel as I thought there may not be enough room, but looking at it all installed there seems to be plenty of room without having to modify it.

(more on next post)

EDIT: asleep at the spellcheck wheel

Gavin

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