Manual Conversion Dramas!

[damo03]

Thought I would share my experience over the last week about the 3spd auto to 5 Speed manual conversion i have done in the xf. I know this is the e-series thread but you guys are very accoustomed to the conversion.

So the story goes: I purchased a donar car for the conversion and last weekend I took my xf up to the farm where a mate has a pit to do the conversion. It was all going well, and only took about 2 hours to get the manual out of the donar car, and about 1 hour to get the auto out of my car.

Then there was the pedal box, which I managed to get out in about 1 and a half hours and put in in the same time, buy dropping the steering, but not taking the dash out so i was stoked!

Then it came time to bolt the manual in the xf. The first step was to bolt manual flywheel onto the crank and this is where the dramas started. The bloody bolts out of my car (the auto) were shorter and fatter than the bolts out of the manual xf. This meant that there was no more I could do untill i could get long, fat bolts to go through the thicker manual flywheel and bolted to the crank.

So that was the end of the weekend, and then on tuesday arvo i planned to purchase the bolts and go to the farm and finish the job.

This opened up a whole can of worms when purchasing these bolts as they were not available in a hi tensile bolt of that size anywhere. The only option was to use a allen key style head, and lathing the head down (as it was way too high, then very carefully torqueing it up to the crank as i had very little purchase on the head with the allen socket as a result of lathing the heads of the bolt.

This seemed to go ok, considering everything, and then it ONLY took 45 min to get the shaft on the gearbox into the flywheel and it was all alligned. After bolting up all the other stuff and checking everything it was time to start the car.

The car seeemed fine but was very rough, and made a scraping noise, and wasnt as fast as i rekined it should be. The scraping noise is due to the big boss on the front uni's scraping the body deadening material which was not on the other car. I attribute this to my car being a fairmont. This is not a big issue as it will wear away and stop scraping over time (hopefully).

The second issue was that driving home from the farm i would lose power and could not go faster than 60 for a fair bit of the trip. This was primarially due to a vacuum line disconnected and retarding the spark cronically!

Also another thing slowing the car down was dragging brakes as the brake and cruise cancel switch on the brake pedal was set out too far and causing the brake to engage.

These things had me thinking, "no worries, just the sort of stuff you sort out as you go along".

The biggest worry is a huge vibration i have in the car when i rev with the clutch in or in gear. The higher it gets (from about 2500rpm) the harsher the vibration esp when driving along. The vibration is soo bad that by 4000rpm the car cannot really rev harder cos its soo bad. This really annoys me as the car really picks up then slows in accelleration cos of this vibration.

I figure that it could be one of these things:

a:harmonic ballancer gone out of wack, and made more known by the heavier flywheel and clutch on the engine. The pulley has quite a wobble in it.

b: power steering pump wobble or bearing gone. This would be easy to fix.

c: The most likely problem and a bugga to fix: Something is stuffed with the clutch / flywheel and I have to pull the gearbox out to find this and fix it up. What a bloody bastard. I will have to pull the flywheel cover off and see if it wobbles when the engine is running.

I can also take the belts off the steering and fan and see what that does, and replace the ballancer, and if it isnt fixed then move onto the gearbox but it looks like many more man hours here to get it perfect! Suggestions are welcome as to where the vibration is from


My advice: Try to get a manual first off if you can and it ALWAYS takes longer than expected, however the better accelleration, speed, economy on highway is great! Also the wheelspin i have never had before in the dry is fantastic!


A tired and greasy Damo
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