OK, update time, sorry for my laziness, the weather has been to good to not ride the bike
I have got the gearbox sitting nicely in the tunnel, there is very little room around the tunnel support in front of the stock shifter hole, I increased this slightly by pressing the gearbox up using a jack, then removing the box again an carrying out some more masseuse work with the soft blow hammer. I also had to drill the bell housing on the z33 box where the breather comes out - the z33 comes straight up, and sits to high, so I drilled out the hole and fitted the 90 degree fitting from the S15 6 speed.
The shifter sits about 70mm further back, even with the shifter mechanism shortened as much as possible, I will upload some pics, but the centre of the shifter sits about at the back edge of the leather gear boot. I used a drill to radius the holes first, then connected the dots with a grinder. To seal the original hole, I have used a piece of 12mm silicone rubber I had lying around, its not perfect, but seals OK, and sits over the lump of the shifter mechanism/mount that sits into the stock gearshift hole.
Now to the annoying bit - after fitting the box up (for what I thought was the last time), I discovered that the input spline was not picking up on the front clutch plate (ORC twinplate remember
), and also the throwout bearing carrier was almost coming off snout of the gearbox when it was just resting on the clutch fingers.
NOTE *** I think this is more to do with my homemade ORC twin plate flywheel copy, and should be OK if you use either a standard HD type clutch and S13/14 flywheel, or a complete twin plate clutch kit to suit S13/14.
I have got around these issues by doing the following - the front clutch plate has been reversed, with a small amount of the rear plate splines removed (at the front) to allow the front plate to sit inside it. I will take some pictures before I install, but it will now pick up on all the spline. To fix the throwout bearing problem, I simply made a press on spacer to extend the throwout bearing toward the clutch, and silver soldered it to the original carrier.
I am now awaiting a new TOB to arrive, as the old one was damaged, and should hopefully be installing the gearbox this week. I will be taking the last of the pics then. After that, I just need to work out a gear boot, and it soulf be back to having my own car again (thank god for work cars)
Steph
