I attempted, and completed, the transmission swap I'd been dreading these past months. It only took about 7 hours, and I did it solo. Luckily the clutch, flywheel and pressure plate were all interchangeable, so there were no issues there. I got to pick and choose from the best of the lot, and since the clutch and PP from the maroon car were newer, I used those with the original flywheel (less scoring/stress cracks).I didn't get around to wiring up the speedo before the swap however, so I drove around for a couple of days without any kind of speed indicator. When I finally got around to putting the new cluster in, nothing worked. AT ALL. I tracked down a couple of wiring diagrams and after tracing out every pin on each cluster, I found that they were the same. So why wasn't I getting power? Well, turns out the +12 on the electric (86+) speedometer supplies power to the cluster, and the original +12 from the other connectors only provide illumination. Fabulous. But I got that all sorted out and now all that is left is to hook up the wires to the rear end speed sensor and it'll be done.
I did notice last night that the car is spewing oil onto the exhaust, however. I replaced the RMS while I was in there, so I don't think that's where it's coming from. I'm really hoping it's just the oil pan gasket, because I've got one of those and I was planning on doing that anyway when I replaced the engine mounts. Crossing fingers!
