DIY Clutch and Rear cradle removal

[BigMatt]

Here is my write up of how to remove your rear cradle, remove rear cradle bushings, remove your driveshaft, transmission, clutch, and replace them all. I'm still in the middle of doing all of this so I will update it as I go. The first couple pics are just some of the goodies I have to put on my car during this project. See sig for the rest.

First up is to jack the car up with enough ground clearance to remove the transmission. I believe I read on here that you need about 18" of ground clearance.

Next I removed the exhaust

I forgot to take pics of how I removed the rear cradle bushings but I used a trick I learned on here, by heating up around the bushing with a propane torch and putting a socket above the bushing and jacking up the cradle and using the weight of the car to push out the bushing. I had them all out in about 20 mins, it was a piece of cake.

Next up I removed the driveshaft using a t60 torx bit and an 18mm(pretty sure) wrench, make sure you mark the ds so that you can put it in the same way you took it out. I'm replacing mine with a dss 1000hp aluminum piece but I showed you how to mark it in case you reuse yours.

After the driveshaft was out I unbolted the calipers and brake line and hung them up using zip ties.

[BigMatt]

After the driveshaft was out of the way you can get access to the parking break cable. You remove this by simply pulling the ball down through the hole (thats what she said)

Next just follow the parking break lines and remove them from their holders there are three on each side.

There's a connector on the passenger side that needs to be unclipped. The small tab on the connector pulls back toward you and just slides out.

Then I unbolted the rear coils from the body using I think a 15mm socket.

After you make sure you disconnected everything I just put a jack under the center of the diff and pulled it straight out. It stayed perfectly balanced on there just be careful lowering it down.

[BigMatt]

Next up on the list is to remove the shifter from the transmission. Luckily I already have the mgw shifter so all I had to do was pull down the dust boot, pull out the clip using a flat head screwdriver and unbolt the shifter arms from the side of the shifter assembly.

The next few shots are just all of the sensors and the cooling lines that have to be removed from the transmission. After they are all removed I moved the entire harness up and over to the passenger side of the transmission. I also removed my O2 sensors just so they wouldn't be damaged when I pulled back the transmission.

There are also some places where the harness is "pinned" to the transmission, all I did to remove these was take a flat head screwdriver and pop them out

Before I removed the clutch fluid line I went ahead and drained out the reservoir and capped off the clutch line. I'm going to be putting a separate clutch fluid reservoir and tick speed bleeder and braided clutch line so I figured I'd do it now rather than dumping fluid all over the floor from underneath.

[BigMatt]

Thats as far as I got today, I'll post more as I get it done

[Jerry7297]

Very useful info. Well done man, thanks for the good pics and procedures. I will be doing my rear cradle bushing soon and want to try the method you stated. Cause I helped some buddies do a different car and it was not that easy.

[biggerisbetter]

gonna be awesome man keep up the good work

[BigMatt]

OK so after you get the harness off to the passenger side (I tucked mine behind my headers) I pulled down the black covers over the transmission cooling lines. Under the covers is a C clip that needs to be removed in order to pull the coolant line out.

Then I unbolted the coolant line from the bottom of the tranny

I went to harbor freight this afternoon and picked up this tranny jack for $80, some people said it wasn't necessary but I found it very helpful. It made sliding the tranny out pretty easy.

After you unbolt the transmission crossmember slowly lower the back of the tranny down until you can see the top bolt of the bell housing, This is where you need the 4ft extension and 15mm swivel socket.

I used a telescoping magnet to get the bolts. This is what I'm going to use to get the bolts back in also.


After you get the 8 bolts out slide the transmission back. I had to turn it counterclockwise so that the bellhousing on the drivers side would clear the tranny tunnel. You don't need to turn it a lot. Just enough to get it past.

Once you get that out of the way you can pull out your old clutch by unbolting the clutch from the flywheel, then since I was replacing mine with a Street Slayer Twin Carbon I pulled off my flywheel too.

My clutch looked almost brand new, even though it has 30,000 miles on it and this was the clutch that I learned how to drive stick on. 10,000 miles of which were cammed with JRE smooth idle

Next I bolted on my new (much lighter) flywheel and lined up my clutch plates, making sure I have the plates facing the right way, then I bolted up the cover.

This is as far as I got tonight, I'm going to keep this thread going with the LPE fuel pumps next.

[Stealth 2010 2SS/RS]

Good work. You got one hell of a shopping list there.

[BigMatt]

Yep lots of work done, lots more to do haha. Thanks for the tips they helped a lot!

[Medi0cr3]

Nice! Now for the hard part! Reinstallation :P

[BigMatt]

Yea it's going to be fun getting it back in haha. I'm hoping that tranny jack makes it pretty easy though.

[Stealth 2010 2SS/RS]

Originally Posted by BigMatt

Yea it's going to be fun getting it back in haha. I'm hoping that tranny jack makes it pretty easy though.

The tranny jack makes life easy, you won't regret getting it.

[BigMatt]

Yea it was definitely worth the investment. I got it all back together last night. So I'll post up more pics when I get home from work.

[Stealth 2010 2SS/RS]

I'm going to use the tranny jack when I do my ZL1 diff swap. That diff is much heavier then the stock one. Good to see everything went back together.