beard_thicc

Figured I'd document my journey a bit so someone else might benefit in the future. I know I had a ton of unknowns going into this and I'd have loved a writeup specific to this truck. This will be a little disjointed as I'm at work, and I may end up coming back with more info as I finish up.



My truck is a '93 one ton dually with the 3vze with the 4 speed auto (A340...E? I think?). Worked great until it stopped going into overdrive reliably. I troubleshooted for two days before deciding to just send it with the swap (I already had the transmission)

Sourcing parts:
I live in NY, so finding a 2wd donor truck locally was a no go. I was able to find an eBay listing for a complete R150 (not R150F, that's the 4wd version) in Arizona for $1500 shipped. Pricey probably, but it was verified working with low miles so I went for it. I did have to replace the speedometer sensor as the gear was broken, and the reverse switch as the wires were cut too short.

Most of my other parts came off a 1990 22re regular pickup I traded a buddy for. That included pedal box, shifter boot, and rear transmission mount plate (which ended up being wrong...I'll get to that later). My biggest recommendation if you're pulling off a donor is to keep it until you're done with the swap, and to make sure you keep the OTHER side of all the electrical connectors...I'll get to that later. Also, grab any and all associated bolts/nuts, you'll need those too.

For pretty much everything else I went with new parts. You can absolutely reuse stuff like clutch cylinders and lines, but I opted to start fresh. I sorted most things off rockauto, some from yotashop and the alike, and some even from the dealer.

My trans was out of a T100, so it's the 5vze version of the r150. THIS IS IMPORTANT. If you get this version, you will need the 3vze flywheel, clutch, and pressure plate, but the 5vze throwout bearing. If you're using rock auto, one from a 95 T100 should work. You will also need the corresponding clutch slave cylinder, as the 3vze one will not fit the 5vze and vice versa.

I'm not sure if this is true for the 3vze R150, but for mine I needed several bell housing bolts much longer than the originals. I ended up bolting the trans up with as many bolts as I could, measuring up with a caliper, then ordering the bolts I needed online. They're all either m10-1.25 or m12-1.25 at various lengths.

Lastly is the rear transmission mount bracket. This is the bracket that bolts to the crossmember, and where the rear MOUNT bolts to. If you're pulling from a donor pickup, GRAB THIS BRACKET. The bracket is different depending on model and engine configuration. The 22re manual bracket will not fit the dually, and I don't think the T100's will either, so grab this bracket if you can.

Removing the auto:
Pulling out the auto trans was no different from any other. Drained out as much fluid as I could, unbolted the drive shaft (MAKE SURE TO USE A CHOCK OR E-BRAKE OR BOTH), removed the cooler lines (capped them with rubber caps at the radiator) and slowly took out all the bell housing bolts. I had to unbolt the sway bar, but keeping it in until I was ready to remove the trans helped with the horrible balancing act that is lowering the trans out of the truck. You'll need to unbolt the rear mounting plate as well. YOU WILL DUMP TRANS FLUID EVERYWHERE. It's inevitable, buy a drip pan and some cat litter. I also bought a transmission jack from harbor freight and it definitely saved me a lot of swearing.




The shifter hole:
Next challenge was cutting the hole for the shifter. Most of the examples I could find online were 4wd swaps, so I used that information and my best judgement. Here's how my process went.
1. I bolted the transmission to the bell housing with a few bolts, rested it in the rear mount, then used a paint marker to trace around the circular part where the shifter goes in.
2. Then I peeled back the 'carpet' and ran a hole saw a little larger than the circular part through where I marked. This allowed me to bolt the transmission back up and plug the shifter in.
3. At this point you should take a chisel and knock/peel off the sound deadening that's coating the floor in the rough area where the shifter is gonna be (I didn't do this first and it caused problems).
4. I put the shifter boot on, and traced around the outside of the boot.
5. I took everything back out (you can leave the trans in, just make sure to stuff the shifter hole with something so no stuff gets in the tranmission), lined the boot plate up with the marks, traced the inside of the plate, and used an angle grinder to cut the hole.
6. Put the plate back on again and mark then drill holes for the plate bolts. You could probably use just nuts and bolts here, but I opted to get a rivnut gun and used some 1/4-20 machine screws.
7. You'll probably want to paint or treat the bare metal you've just created underneath the truck where you cut.
8. Cut a hole in the carpet.the right size. You can actually use the inside of the boot bracket again as a template, but it's tricky. I ended up cutting mine a little wonky, and you can see the edges of my cuts. I'll 3d print a skirt to cover the mistake later on.

You can see what I mean about the coating in the photos below. If you trace it out with a chisel and hammer, it chips right out. I didn't do this at first and wasted four rivnuts since they weren't riveting properly.






The rear mount bracket:
Remember that really specific rear transmission mount bracket I mentioned before? Yeah, well my trans didn't come with a bracket, at my donor truck was a 22re. So what I ended up with was my existing bracket (which was too long) and the 22re truck bracket (which was too short). What's a boy to do?






Meet the frankenbracket. I made this by cutting the two brackets I had at a spot where I thought they may match up. Then I took the 22re's crossmember side, and the 3vze auto's transmission side, bolted them up in their respective spots, jacked the tail of the transmission into the right place, and tack welded the bracket. Some good booger welding inside and outside, and a coat of paint, and she's off to the races.

Obviously I don't recommend you do this unless you have to. I couldn't find the proper bracket for my application anywhere online, so I just went for it and it seems to have worked just fine.

Clutch kit & slave cylinder:
We're a bit out of order here, but I wanted to mention this part. Originally I ordered a whole Exedy clutch kit and clutch slave cylinder for my specific truck. As I said earlier, this was a mistake...I figured I'd explain why:

Since my transmission is out of the 5vze equipped T100, the clutch fork is actually positioned further into the trans than on a 3vze R150. This meant I got a nice surprise when I bolted everything up and my slave cylinder plugner didn't reach my clutch fork at full extension. The difference is the throwout bearing on the 5vze truck has a longer collar. I was able to order a replacement, but I did have to unbolt the transmission which was a pain.

At the same time I discovered the clutch slave wasn't correct either. On the 5vze R150 it hangs down and in toward the bell housing a little, as opposed to up and out on the 3vze version.

Pedal box:
This part is pretty straightforward, and well documented, but I figured I'd share my method. Basically you're swapping the brake portion of your pedal box out for one that has both a brake and clutch. The new bracket will also have two studs that poke through the firewall and bolt up to your new clutch master cylinder. The tricky part is drilling the holes in the correct spot.

As many forum posts on this point out, the existing bracket on your automatic is actually the same, just without all the clutch pedal parts. This gives us some 'stencil' holes to work with. Some use forsner bits or some center-finding math to figure it all out...I just 3d printed some jigs to suit:





Once I had these pilot holes, I unbolted my auto brake bracket, widened the holes with a step bit, then bolted in the new bracket and clutch master. Mine didn't end up perfect, but good enough for me.

Wiring:
Another well-documented process, but again i wanted to share my take. To figure out which wires you need for each connection, I highly recommend looking at the service manual for your truck. The wiring differs between years, so wire colors are not to be trusted.

There's three things that need to be wired for your new transmission:
1. Neutral switch bypass
2. Reverse light switch
3. Speedometer

Some of you may get lucky and both your truck and new transmission are either both electric Speedo, or cable. If you're not lucky, you can get an electric replacement speedometer. This is what I had to do, as the cable Speedo that was in my transmission had a broken plastic gear. I simply bought an electric Speedo off eBay that fit a 95 T100 and it slotted right in, and plugged into the connector.

Another option is to get a cable to electric adapter like this one form YotaMasters:
https://www.yotamasters.com/shop/tra...peedo-adapter/

For the neutral bypass, I ended up cutting off my shifter position switch harnes, and working with the bare wires. This is the fat harness that connects into the shift linkage on the auto. Look at your pinout diagram (service manual) and figure out which wires need to be connected to make the ECU think it's in neutral (or park, some say), then connect those wires...I used solder and shrink tube, and so should you. If you don't do this, your ignition won't crank because the ECU thinks it's in gear.

For the reverse swtich, look at the pinout again and find the two reverse wires. The polarity/order of them doesn't matter (it's just a simple switch), you just need to splice them into the reverse switch. I got lucky and found a connector in my spares box that plugged into the reverse switch. Some older style reverse switches have wires coming out of them, so you could also just splice into this, but I'd recommend using a connector of some kind so you can unplug it if you have to take out the switch or drop the transmission.

You'll be left with a bunch of unused wires from the shifter position harness. I put a bit of heat shrink on the end of each one, as if they short to something they might make the ECU think you're in gear. Then I wrapped all that up in electrical tape and tucked it into some wire loom (you can also just use more tape).



Finally there's two connectors near the tail of the transmission that are unused in the manual. For these I put some heat shrink over the center bit of the connector, tucked the tip of the tubing inside the connector, then ran a small zip tie between the wires, through the center of the connector to secure it all. A bit overkill (you could probably just use tape), but this'll keep water from shorting the connector or something.



Exhaust:
As soon as I got the transmission in, I realized the driver side exhaust header pipe would come straight down into where the clutch slave cylinder is. If you're using a 3vze R150, you might not have this problem, but I was faced with about 4 inches of clearance between the slave cylinder and the header flange.

After avoiding the problem for a while, I eventually decided I needed to make an exhaust pipe with some serious bends in it. You could probably do this with a pipe bender,, or by bringing the truck to an exhaust shop. I decided to teach myself how to do horrible sloppy pie cuts:






As of writing this, I'm not done with this part, so maybe I'll update with a finished product photo. I plan to either paint this part with some ceramic header paint, or wrap it to avoid cooking the slave cylinder.

The driveshaft:
Okay, here's the big one. The driveshaft for the manual 2wd pickups was slightly longer than the automatics, due to the slightly shorter tail housing in the manual. People have many (well documented) ways around this, including just grabbing a manual drive shaft for their pickup...except as far as I can tell, the dually never existed with a 3vze AND a manual transmission (or if it was, it was incredibly rare).

I deliberated on this problem for a long time, trying to find an easy way, and eventually settled on having my driveshaft lengthened (and balanced), on the recommendation of many forum users, as well as my friends. Except, when I went to my 'local' drive shaft shops, they all looked at me sideways, asked me what the shaft was out of, then told me some variation of 'we can't do that'. The clearest answer I got was that one shop couldn't balance the shaft (which is important if you want to go over 20mph) because it wouldn't fit on their machine?

Presently, I've shipped my driveshaft out to these guys: http://www.driveshaftspecialist.com/
I had a nice long email conversation with Craig, who assured me that not only could they lengthen my driveshaft, but that having a new one built would be way out of my price range (haha). The shipping from NY to TX was not cheap, but ideally this is something I'll never have to mess with again. Once I've got my driveshaft back from them, I'll update in this post on my experience with them.

Before sending it out, I did replace the u-joints (aka spider bearings) and carrier bearing. The carrier bearing just unbolts, and has to be pressed in by torquing the nut to a particular spec (see the service manual). The u-joints require a special tool which I got from Lisle:
https://www.lislecorp.com/specialty-tools/42890

Welp, that's the story so far. Like I said, I'll update here in the future as I finish up the swap. Thanks for reading, hope this helps someone!

superex87

Good job! Those pesky transmission brackets are even different between types of manual transmission. I had a 88 2wd with a g series 4 speed and swapped to a w series 5 speed and the brackets were different between the two. I have seen 1 3vze 2wd 5 speed for sale once. Haven't seen another one since.

beard_thicc

Thanks man! Yeah I was perplexed when I found out about the brackets. Usually Toyota is very Lego about these kinds of things.