6. Installing the manual transmission

This write up is only intended as an overview of converting your CVT Civic to Manual transmission. By reading further, you are agreeing that by attempting to do anything you see here, I am in no way responsible to any damage you cause to your transmission, your car, or yourself. I suggest you purchase a service manual for all the details, such as torque specs & tightening order.
Get your clutch, pressure plate, and flywheel. Put a new pilot bearing in the flywheel.







Get your Manual flywheel bolts which are longer than the auto ones. Don't re-use the auto ones.







Some say use thread lock, some say don't bother. I use a little bit on the bolts.







Tighten them in a crisscross pattern, to 78 ft lbs. I believe. check your manual.

If you have trouble with the flywheel turning, you can use a bar and wedge it between the 12 point 10mm clutch bolts and the tranny bolts. There's 6 clutch bolts so you can wedge the bar in different positions to torque all of the flywheel bolts.











Next line up the clutch and stick your clutch alignment tool in to hold it in place.







Then line up the pressure plate in the right holes and bolt it in with the 12 point 10mm clutch bolts.







Install a new release bearing or "throwout bearing" as it is sometimes called. Apply some grease so it slides smooth.







It should slide like below:











Now you're ready to put your manual tranny in. Getting the shaft lined up with that pilot bearing is not easy, it never goes in without having to wrestle with it for a bit.















In the above pics, by tranny has no mount bolts. You can buy them from the dealer, or I took mine from the CVT. Sometimes they do not really want to come out though.







There is a bolt that goes in the third hole on the inside. But my tranny had the threads stripped in this hole so I only used 2 on the outside.







Now is a good time to bolt up the rear bracket. The CVT bracket uses smaller dia. bolts than the manual.







When you are putting this huge 19mm bolt in, be extremely careful. On the other side where this bolt comes through is a junction harness with some very important wires. Move the harness out of the way or you will pinch them between the bolt and the intake manifold bracket. This happened to me and it caused a major headache when I finally got the car back together.







Learn from my mistake:











The other side of the bracket:







You'll need to buy the right sized bolts for these holes.











The old ones next to the CVT bracket are smaller than the new ones I got from the dealership.







And while you're at the dealership, pick up a lower starter bolt, it is longer for a manual tranny. (in center of second pic)











There's a couple more brackets that you need that connect the lower side of the tranny to the block.

First get the service plate ready to install.







And here's the 2 brackets you need to put back on:







Behind the rusty exhaust, you see the long bracket re-installed. The end of the bracket goes over the sevice plate and helps to hold it on as well.







Here is the smaller aluminum bracket installed:







While you're here... I don't think it matters, but you can cap the transmission coolant lines on the radiator since you won't be needing them anymore.