So, a year and a half ago I got an exceptional deal from a friend on a WRB WRX wagon. It came with a extra driveline from an 07 WRX he purchased from a member on NASIOC. As my friend noticed, this type of swap is not easy and has a lot of issues when performing it with the existing wiring; nightmare after nightmare of issue when just repining the 4eat Bulkhead harness. I am sure I was the first to think of this, but I got to thinking if I also replaced the 4EAT bulkhead harness with a 5mt bulkhead harness, it should be as if it came from the factory that way since mechanically everything bolts right on. I noticed no one had made any right ups in the places I was directed to look and search through on the various sites in relation to swapping the harness out, so I did a write up on what I did. In the end I didn’t have any issues that were mentioned with the other methods outlined involving repining 4eat bulkhead harness. So if you are interested have a look. Hope it is informative.
I'll let you know I notice anything from my swap. I'm picking up a 02 drive terrain today for my 05 outback sport.
No pics?! :| For my 4EAT to 6mt swap I made a conversion harness that would plug into the 4EAT bulkhead. The two wires sticking out are for DCCD pigtail which was not added at the time the picture was taken. I also pulled the dash as repinned/added wires as needed to maintain factory MT functionality. Now that I've done it once and figured out the best (to me) way of doing it, it's not a bad conversion. I'm not a fan of how most of the online "how-to's" did it either.
As proven by about 99% of vwvortex on anything that wasn't copied out of a bentley manual. as far as the harness mounted to the trans itself (I haven't looked too closely yet) it should directly plug into the main harness fine as long as i have the proper/matching ECU for the whole setup right? (for me it would be a 02-05 ish outback sport manual ecu) secondary question is do these cars have TCU's separate from the main ECU? The last three things i swapped manuals into either were too old to have ECU's or were basically lego like cars (JEEPS)
You are so right. I scoured the forester forums for proper way to do it... The disappoint. :| Yea it probably does. Check if your car is OBDII or CanBus. If the later, you're going to have a bad time. Look into getting a MT abs module and ECU. If done right you should be able to retain ABS and cruise control
In my case there was a TCU that if I kept the EAT harness would have had some king of wiring. Once we swapped in the 5MT Harness and hooked it up it was as if it came that way. I was pretty disappointed with what I found and completely understand why the guy I bought my car from never did it. Looking at the pictures you are as far as I went or at least the pulling of the dash, check this place out if you want www.sspparts.com which is where I got my bulkhead harness from. was pretty cheap, $300 for the bulkhead, instrument cluster, and master cylinder with hard line and flex. everything worked fine with my project, no issues everything works. Was pretty cool.
My swap is already done I pulled the dash to swap to a MT dash harness but my problem was I did not have an equivalent dash harness to match my interior options.
Bummer, that is a lot of work pulling all that stuff off. I actually got lucky because I didn't realize right away that there was the climate control stuff that could have been better, although my car didn't have anything fancy in it really. Everything went together and turned out pretty good. My only issue was I should have pulled the tranny apart before I installed it as it was obvious someone else had been in there. It turned out the person that worked on it didn't peen the main shaft nut properly and it backed off. caught it quick enough though that I only had to replace the nut and a sync ring. time to work on the exterior next. I will work on getting the pictures I took of the process soon.
So here are some of the pictures I took as we worked through the project. One think I don't think I mentioned in the document I loaded is that the shift assembly didn't come with the plate that holds the rubber boot in place and I had to buy that. But have a look.
When I did my swap everything was plug and play after swapping out the bulkhead harness. We didn't make any changes to the ECU the first time through the process, but as far as the car acted like it had been a manual. Now in the Map (stock at the time) it still had the tag for an auto but it didn't seem to matter. After we tested some and made sure all was working we did go back and replace the Map with one for a manual. Let us know how your project is going.
I've been on the search for a 05 outback sport bulkhead harness but it might be awhile before finding one.
