Good find but this guys article is full of inconsistencies.

Fist of all he didn't do the conversion himself so I'm not so sure he's all that familiar or comfortable with the conversion.

Of course swapping a tranny is tough work but that has nothing to do with the conversion, any tranny work on any car whether auto or manual is tough period because of where it is located. The actual conversion as it relates to the shifter and clutch pedal/lines and master cylinder and wiring is easy.

The six shops he called probably just told him it was too hard and would take too long because they did not want to put themselves in a compromising position. No shop in their right mind will do anything to your car that is not oem, there is too much liablility involved with doing custom conversions and fabrications that alter the cars oem state. Try to find any shop that's not a speed/tuner shop and ask them to do a hybrid motor swap and they will tell you to take a hike. As for that shop that said it would take three weeks, I wouldn't even go there for an oil change... it would probably take them three days. Put it this way... ask a shop how long it would take to replace a bad tranny with an identical replacement then ad an hour or two for the actual conversion of the pedals, shifter and wiring.... and that would be how long it takes for a conversion.... it definitely doesn't add up to three weeks or even three days! I've seen my buddy replace bad trannys with new ones in just a few hours.

Next, the brake/gas pedal assemblies have exactly the same pitch, angle, and spacing between the auto and the manual. The only difference is that on the auto, the brake pedal is much wider. Trust me I had both assemblies in my hands and compared them... I opted to just remove the brake pedal from the two and swap them since my autos gas pedal had the hookups for the cruise controls throttle cable and the manuals gas pedal did not since it was from a non-cruise car.

Hydrolic clutch lines... I don't know how or most importantly why you would even consider trying to fabricate something out of copper lines from home depot, that is very iffy stuff... just pick them up from a salvage yard for dirt cheap.

Now, the shifters boot.... this is not tricky at all. The center consoles in the civics are exactly the same in both the auto and the manual... they both have the exact same hole... the only difference is what fills that hole. On the auto you have the shifter which comes up through a plastic slider plate and on the maual the shifter comes up through a faux-leather boot. With either the plastic plate or the leather boot, they are both held into the center console with 4 screws... the actual hole in the console is the exact same. I just took a leather boot off of a civic in a junk yard and it screwed right in to the same place on the console as where the automatics plastic plate was.

Finally is the whole gauge cluster issue. You don't have to remove any bulbs to keep the gear indicator lights from coming on. These are all controlled by the subharness wires on the plastic slider that I mentioned in the previous post.

The reason this guys park light is on, is because the shop didn't short just the two fat blk/rd & blk/w park wires like I said... instead they just slapped the plastic slider into the park position and probably glued it there. In the park position there is a third wire on the slider for the gauge cluster light... Down one side of the gear selectors slider there are a row of greeen wires that are only for the gauge cluster lights. On the auto when the car is in any one position, one of these wires are shorted with the ground and makes the light on your dash come on. Either cut all of the wires and tape them up so they don't short with anything and no lights will come on or do what I did and short the green wire from the drive position with the ground... I did this just for the hell of it so my drive light would always be on... well actually, I killed two birds with one stone by shorting the green drive wire, the pink cruise control wire, and the black ground wire together so that the drive light would be on and cruise would also work.

Anyhow, to sum it up, this is no harder than replacing a bad tranny with a new one which is done all the time except that you'll need the tranny mount which you could probably get with the tranny when you buy it if you ask. The rest is easy stuff that only adds an hour or two to the time it would normally take to replace a tranny. It's just a matter of finding the parts... call importautosalvage.com and ask for Randy... he is very knowledgable and will get you everything you need. :thumbup: