kenlrw39 wrote:i think by august I should have it swap to 5spd.
i'm gonna go ahead and throw this out there now, it'll be easier (and probably cheaper) to sell the lara and BUY a 5spd.
the amount of work involved in doing a swap is immense, and you'll end up dropping almost as much money to swap as it would cost to cover the difference of a 5spd solara.
also, sourcing parts is problematic, unless you already have access to the manual tranny parts, i.e. from a decommissioned 5spd solara, or another toyo/lexus that uses the same tranny....
do a search, it's been discussed many times over....as well as been done a couple times. check out txbumblebee's thread about his tranny swap, and you'll get an idea of how involved a process it is.
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let me put it this way: i had the opportunity to do a swap, i blew my auto tranny, and was going to have to put the car in the shop anyway. i was seriously considering doing the swap....like you are.
after hunting for parts, and a shop that could handle the swap, the projected cost for a tranny swap was around $4-5k USD, while my salvage auto tranny (with only 67k miles on it)+labor cost me less than $1300 total.
plus, putting in the new auto took about a week (less than, really), whereas doing a swap would have kept the lara tied up for at least a couple weeks upto a month.
in contrast, you could probably sell the lara for about $4-5k, depending on condition of the vehicle, and then find a 5spd for probably less than $8k from a private seller (or on here!). so if you sell it at 4k, and find one for 8k....that's 4 grand spent, which is about the same....except there is no downtime while your car is in the shop.
and if you do the swap, then you have to worry about fabricating parts, making sure everything is done correctly, and that it'll all hold together once you get it on the road. while buying a whole car has the benefit of having been designed as a 5spd. while the differences aren't night and day, there are enough differences to make it difficult, or expensive to do a swap.
just some food for thought. i'm not trying to discourage you from doing it, if you really want to, then you should. but if you're still on the fence, these are some points to consider before committing to a serious mechanical project like a tranny swap.