I’m curious about if you can swap a tranny without removing the engine. Is it possible to just lift the front half of the car a few feet off the ground and drop the old tranny and put a new one into place? How much does a manual transmission weigh?
I was also wondering which manual tranny would be the best for a NA nonvtec application. I obviously want a vtec tranny for the closer gears and since the ys1 is so rare and expensive when you do find it I was thinking along the lines of the jdm y1, s1 or j1. TIA.
you can do it with the engine in the car, you’ll still need a hoist though because the transmission is attached to 3 mounts and the engine will only be supported by one mount. the front and rear both attach to the bellhousing.
basically just the same process as removing the axles to change them out, then make sure you have the hoist attached securely to the engine, and get under there and remove the mounts. read up in the helms manual section and it’ll be cake. if you don’t have it already you can download the Helms from here:
give it a weekend and you’ll want a garage in warm weather. it got nippy here in iowa so thankfully i had a nice warm indoor bay to swap.
as for the tranny, it’s really up to you, what your preference is. Any short-geared VTEC tranny will work fine, the Y1 i believe is the shortest gearing. J1’s are fairly rare, and Y1’s are available with factory LSD (and in the cable trannies it was a gear-type LSD as opposed to later models which had a clutch-type LSD. The gear-type never needs servicing, whereas the clutch-type (think ITR) will need servicing when the clutch plates wear out).