Automatic to Manual Conversion

Converting your automatic vehicle to a manual:

Besides the obvious fact that to perform this conversion you will need to buy a manual transmission. There are a number of other small things that need to be performed before your car is ready for the road. These are a bit tricky, as you need to source a bunch of parts. First up, you need new engine/tranny mounts. they are different between the automatic and manual cars. The only mount that is the same is the passenger side engine mount (I believe), the rest are all different.

aw11motormounts

Now, get yourself a new brake pedal and clutch pedal from a manual car. The brake pedal on the automatic is twice as big as the manual, maybe automatic drivers have trouble pressing the brakes? I cleaned up everything since it was a bit rusty and purchased some new rubber pedal covers from toyota. Installation of the brake pedal is easy, it just replaces the old one (or you can just cut the old pedal to a smaller size). Although working in this area of the car can be tricky. I found lying on my back with the seat out was the easiest.

 

Installation of the clutch pedal requires you to drill out 3 holes for mounting. Fortunately Toyota left outlines of the exact holes you need to drill. So all you do is cut within the lines! I used a high power makita dremel for this. After you have the holes drilled, you can mount your pedal and master cylinder. I purchased a brand new exedy master cylinder, was not very expensive and looks great.

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To continue the auto-to-manual conversion. The next thing you need to do is get rid of that clunky auto shifter and put in the new one you rebuilt. The mounting holes line up exactly so everything is great.

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Now for the hardest part, you need to run a clutch line, since your car doesn’t have one. The stock manual car’s clutch line is in several parts. The first hard line runs from the clutch master cylinder through the frunk floor to a distribution T-block. From this T-block a long hard line runs to the rear of the car, right into the engine bay. Since I was able to source the first hard line, I was trying to get my hands on a stock T-line block but this was pretty much impossible.

clutch hose

The problem is that the stock clutch line fittings are metric, and in a weird hard to find size, M12. I was not able to find any store, physical or on the internet that sold connector blocks for this size, so it looked like I couldn’t use my stock short hard line. I really wanted to use it though because it looks stock and it already has all the weird bends required to get it through the floor of the frunk. I decided to cut off the end, remove the stock fitting and put an SAE (common) connector. I then used an SAE T-block and ran the long hard line to the back. At the back you will need to use the stock M12 connector though since the flexible line on the clutch uses this connection type.

I decided to upgrade the flexible line that goes to the tranny slave and went with a stainless steel line from speed source. I also rebuild the clutch slave cylinder.

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The next thing you need to do is source a set of manual shifter cables. Since the automatic only has a single line and its the wrong size/style. To run the lines through the stock hole in the firewall you need to cut a bigger opening in the rubber bushing. After this you can shove the lines through and connect them up to the tranny shifter. I decided to get solid brass cable inserts for a stiffer shifter feel. The install was painless.

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The last thing you need to do to finish the conversion is get a manual ECU or just play with the wiring a little bit and disable the neutral safety switch or something. Since I was doing the 20V swap at the same time I had to re-do all the wiring and change the ECU anyway.

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Just a note, I also wired up the clutch safety switch like a stock manual car has, this is a switch that only lets the car crank if the clutch is fully depressed. You don’t need to have it, you can easily bypass it by connecting the wires together directly, but I included it for safety.

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