When an old car is breaks down, the cost to repair it is often far greater than what the car is worth. New parts are often indefinitely out of stock or and the only way to keep them on the road is to pull parts from one that has already been deemed too expensive to fix. When one E30 dies, several E30's will live because of it, this is the fate and blessing of a donor car.

Since my automatic transmission took a crap on me 2 months ago, I've been in search of a replacement. I didn't know if I wanted to save time and install another automatic, or perform a transmission swap to manual, which will take me more time to compile the parts and do the extra work to convert the car.

The search for a 5 Speed Manual Transmission

Thanks to modern internet, I had plenty of resources to find the right parts, including online forums, ebay and craigslist, but all of those sources failed after 2 months of searching. Instead, I found the right manual gearbox through word of my mouth. My friends dad owned a scrap shop years ago and she asked him for some recommendations to the whereabouts of a functional gearbox. In less than a day, she pointed me to Weber Brothers Autoparts, 2 hours away from me in King of Prussia PA, who unfortunately didn't have one. But the technician at the shop knew someone who owns the same car and happened to own an parts shop called Ferrer Autoparts. A quick call lead to yet another shop called BimmerBuddies, just outside of Hershey PA. They had the part, and I was eager to pick it up.

After 3 hours of driving this saturday, I arrived at their parking lot which was full of BMW's. Some are customer cars waiting repair, others are part of their private collection. A few were zombie BMW's that were just waiting to be gutted for parts. Exactly what I was there to do.

I arrived hoping to pick up a manual transmission AND an automatic transmission. The idea was to install the automatic and drive it until it blows up, meanwhile I would slowly source together all the odds and ends to perform the manual swap. When I got there, the owner, David, threw some fantastic news at me. Another customer bailed on their own 5 speed swap, and they could sell me the whole kit they've been holding! After a short discussion, I laid down my hard earned cash to revive my cheap E30. Did I say that right? Spending good money on a 29 year old car? Yup, that sounds right.

After shooting the shit with these guys for 2 hours, I showed them a photo of my car and they said that they've seen all of my YouTube videos where I detailed how I wrapped my car. We knew each other through the reaches of the internet, making the purchase that much more ironic! I happily put all of the parts in my car and to have met an awesome shop from a small network of people. Bravo to the guys over at BimmerBuddies! Great guys to hang with and meet!

Here's what the kit included:

• Getrag 260 Transmission
• Transmission Brace
• Drive Shaft
• Clutch Pedal
• Clutch Slave Cylinder
• Flywheel
• New Clutch
• New pressure plate
• New Clutch pressure line through firewall
• New Clutch pressure line to master cylinder
• New Transmission bushings
• New Firewall rubber grommets
• New Guibo
• New Flywheel to engine bolts
• New aluminum shifter brace
• New shift brace bracket
• New shift selector cup
• Short throw shifter from Z3

And the missing parts

• Shift selector Rod
• Master cylinder for clutch pedal
• Hydraulic line from Master cylinder to transmission
• Shift lever bushing
• Shifter rod joint
• Rubber shift selector boot

Pretty complete if you ask me!

Back to working on the car

My last post left off with a stuck bolt on the drive shaft. There wasn't enough space below the car to get a sizeable breaker bar in, so I broke out the impact gun to rattle them off. I had to remove the transmission brace to do this.

Here are the bolts on the drive shaft at the transmission end. There are 6 total bolts. Three attach the drive shaft to the guibo, and three attach the guibo to the transmission. You only need to remove the 3 bolts holding the drive shaft to the guibo.

In this photo, the transmission brace is still installed, but you get a nice view of the damage to the transmission mount bushings and the guibo itself. It's been squashed and destroyed from years of use and lack of service.

Here are the transmission bushings. They came out in pieces and were completely shot. Part of me is really excited to drive a car with fresh bushings.

On the other end of the drive shaft is the differential (shown above) which uses the input from the drive shaft to drive the rear wheels. This particular model is something called a limited slip differential, or LSD which splits power to both wheels. Most differentials only split power to one wheel.

Breaking the bolts free at the differential end was far more difficult than at the transmission end. These 17mm bolts were inaccessible with an impact gun, and the only way to get them off was to brute force them by hand. Even though I've worked on machines for over 15 years of my life, I still managed to punch the underside of my car and skin my knuckles. I'm never going to learn and I don't expect to ever.

With all six bolts out, the center support bearing can be removed and the drive shaft will pop right out leaving a car that's even more useless than before!

Here's a shot of the driveshaft-less transmission. Forgive me for the lack of focus, my hands were too greasy to really handle the camera. Yes, that is a piece of wood propping up my transmission! Trust me, I am Engineer!

And looking down the rear side towards the differential.

Removing the Transmission

After you remove the driveshaft, you can unbolt the transmission. This is where things went wrong. The transmission bolts are covered by a transmission plate that is held on with 12 point socket heads.

12 point heads are a bit of an oddity and they are seldom used. In fact, this was perhaps the 2nd time in my life that I've ever seen them. I decided to try a 6 point on it and it was successful for the first bolt, but the second and third bolt were a mess. I stripped the bolt head, making it impossible for my socket to grab the bolt to remove it.

This was a NEWBIE MISTAKE! I knew better! Rusted bolts all need a bit of heat, especially when they are tiny 8mm bolts that cant handle years of rust! What was I thinking?!

So, again I'm stuck and I'm waiting to borrow a torch from a buddy. I'm going to buy a 12 point 8mm head and try to hammer it on. I'm hoping that a little bit of liquid wrench and a LOT of heat will get this bolt off so I can finally unbolt my transmission.

There's plenty of other things for me to do, so stay tuned for part 3!

On other news, I'm still trying to sort of the kinks on my Ducati. I swapped in a new lithium battery and bumped up the CO trim to see if I can stop the intake popping.

Discussion Questions (pick one and comment below?

1. Does anyone have their own secret tip to removing a stripped socket head bolt?

2. Have any of you guys swapped an auto to a Manual? Why did you do it?

3. Anyone else own a Ducati Monster? If so which one?