An easy way to make any vehicle a whole lot of fun to drive, is to stick a manual transmission in it. Unfortunately, manual transmission options have been slowly phased out of the OEM market, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a man pedal in your ride. In this article, we’re going to look at what goes into a six-speed transmission swap.
Our 1994 Volvo Project Swedish Meatball didn’t come with a manual transmission from the factory. After some research, we found that people have six-speed swapped these cars with an LS engine combo like we’re putting in the Meatball. We wanted to make this process as painless as possible, so we reached out to Silver Sport Transmissions to get everything we needed for a six-speed swap.
Silver Sport Transmissions made this swap much easier. Their staff helped us pick out the right parts and sent everything we needed on one pallet.
Planning Is Everything
Since you’re likely going to be putting a six-speed in something that never had one, you better have a plan. Jumping into a project like this without thinking it through is going to put you at risk for experiencing some serious problems. Even with a plan in place, you’ll need to be ready to make changes to said plan along the way because you are guaranteed to run into issues you didn’t think of.
The first step in the planning process should include taking plenty of measurements of the space the transmission and bellhousing are about to occupy. This may seem like common sense, however, just doing the old eyeball measurement isn’t going to be good enough.
The transmission tunnel needed to be convinced a TREMEC Magnum F would fit….
You need to really crawl around the car to measure what space is available, and think about the other parts that need to be accounted for during the swap. A few basic things you need to consider include will you have enough space for the bellhousing, where the shifter will land inside the vehicle, the transmission mount, and how you will mount the clutch pedal.
Now that you have an idea of how much real estate is available, you can think about how the transmission will fit in the car. There can actually be an “easy-button” for this part of the process —someone might actually have already designed a kit for your application. If there isn’t a kit available, you’ll have to rely on your fabrication skills to get the transmission to fit in the car.
There are plenty of mistakes you can make when trying to plan for a…
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