i've been a busy little bee on this over the weekend,
started by finishing off the manual conversion, heres a quick guide to what i did. its pritty straightforward, like for like kinda thing. just disconnect the cable from the autobox to the shifter, remove gear nob thing and the plastic trim from around the shifter (this just prizes off with a flat ended screwdrivers) after that remove the plastic bit that surrounds the gear lever so your left with some thing like this (but with a auto stick of course)
you'll then see 3 ten mm headed bolts holding the base for the lever (there are 4 but you only need to undo 3 of them, think its the one closest to the hand brake and the 2 furthest away). with a little bit of persuasion it should come loose and pull straight out. when refitting the manual gear selector i found it easier to jack the front of the car up so you have clearance for the shaft that goes to the steering rack, also make sure the shaft has gone between the chassis and the anti-roll bar before bolting the selector base back down.
next up is the steering rack, you'll need to fit one from a manual as this has part of the gear selection mechanism on it as this pic shows
next up was the clutch lever, i was told that the steering rack from a manual was needed but on closer inspection i realized this wasn't true, the auto one doesn't have the pin to hold the lever on but it does have the holes that the pin goes through, as seen in this pics
i'm not sure if the pin from the manual rack is removable (i had scrapped the doner car by this point), so i just made another pin at work (being an engineer can have its perks), i used the pin that holds the brake lever as a guide as this is exactly the same as what you would need but shorter as shown here, clutch one top brake one bottom
(its 2 and a quarter inch from the inside of the lip to the groove at the other end in case any one is interested)
then its just a case of slotting it together and using the same kind of clip that holds the brake lever pin in place
there's still the issue of the wiring that goes to the auto shifter that stop's the car from being started in any thing other than 'park'. to sort this all you need to do is take this plug ( found by the fuse box)
the wires on one side go to the gear selector and the wires on the the other side go to the engine bay/fuse box, just unplug this and join the wire that comes in from the bay to the one that goes to the fuse box.
