Alright, so I got inspired last week by
this thread and since I've been
wavering on a manual swap, I thought I'd give it a whirl.
THE PARTS
I ordered just the
basic shift module and the
gear indicator. In retrospect the
plug may have been a good use of money too, if I wanted full auto. More on that in a bit. From order to delivery was about a week. Not bad. The manuals they include are somewhat dense if you're hard of attention, and they didn't include one of the wiring diagrams, but fortunately everything is available
online.
THE INSTALL
The whole thing is a case of wires being about 18" short for our application, so a little creativity in locating the gear indicator (comes prewired) and a bit of extending the 4 shifter wires, is in order. Nothing we're not used to, wiring harness warriors all. If you don't completely cut the transmission plug, you don't need the pink wire they provide. Other than that, just follow the wiring diagrams provided, heat shrink and cover the wires you cut so they don't short, put everything back together. I ran my wires through the tunnel (mine's just Cleco'd in place - will install rivnuts or nut plates and screw it in later) and located the new transmission control unit next to the BCM in the passenger footwell. It's also worth mentioning that
you must unscrew the top of the module and change the jumper to an -80 series transmission. If you don't, it'll indicate up/down correctly but control the transmission backwards (1st is 4th, 2nd is 3rd, etc). Uh... don't ask me how we figured that one out.
You will need to fab your own gear indicator bracket. I made mine from a piece of 2x2" aluminum angle. If you didn't buy one of their
preassembled shift units, you will also need to provide at minimum an up- and down-shift button. Mine are sort of a work in progress. I wanna do paddle shifters but figured I'd get a proof of concept before investing any more time and money into niceties. You can also wire up a TCC engage, Launch Mode select, and brake pedal switch for launch mode. Cute.
THE RESULTS
You still select P, R, N with the "normal" shifter, then any of L, I, D engage our new friend and from there you use the buttons to shift. One avenue for improvement would be to install 4 reed relays on the control lines to switch between the box and the car's TCU - then you could switch into full auto mode if you're just cruising, or manual mode for track use. A clunkier but perhaps less error-prone switching method would be to buy a second transmission plug (available from your local pick 'n' pull or factory new from the kit manufacturer as noted above) and just swap those when you get to the track. In that case you'd need to hook up the power and ground as well, but those should be the only 5 pins required.
This thing really seems worth the money, gives you just about full control over the transmission. A quick test drive showed pretty darn fast shifts with all the benefits that a torque converter provides.
I'll certainly keep everyone updated once I have a couple miles and an autocross or two behind me, but I'm excited for this development!