Awesome, THANKS!

 

Update...

Got a used CD009 for $700 from a local auto salvage place, it came out of an '06 G35 with 80K on it. Yanked out my busted tranny which turned out to be an CD003 (not a CD001). Spent 8 HOURS swapping them yesterday a fun way to spend President's day off from work - NOT!!! You have to remove a lot of stuff and reaching some of bolts was darn near impossible. Heck just jacking up the car high enough to get the 16" bell housing out from under the car ain't easy. Granted we were going slow and being extra careful, with several drink/pizza breaks, but man what an insane job. Somehow we manged to lose two bolts that held the transmission cross member in place so we had the standard panic auto-parts store run before finishing up. The drive shaft was easy and straight forward to remove, same with the Y-pipe. Even the shifter went in/out without any fuss. Overall once the car is up on jack stands its pretty obvious what has to come out - its just a lot of working upside down, in tight spaces, wrenching on some serious bolts. The top two bolts require you to wedge your arm into the space between the firewall and engine - this is not easy at all, you can't see anything, you are going totally by feel. The starter motor and crank position sensor don't have to come out fully, they just need to move to the side for clearance. You'll need several zip ties to clean up the wiring afterwards and maybe some exhaust gaskets plus fresh gear lube. I put in 3 quarts of Royal Purple MaxGear because its GL-4 yellow metal safe.

This CD009 tranny is so much smoother, no more grinding, no vibrations ...its almost perfect. Notice I said "almost"

Turns out the throw-out bearing is bad. Of course you don't realize this until you put everything back together and crank up the engine. So now we get to drop it AGAIN just to replace a $35 part because as is there is a horrible squealing sound when press the clutch in Let this be a warning to anyone doing this job: replace the throw-out bearing when everything is apart!

 

Wow yeah the throw out bearing in our cars suck.

Luckily the transmission in my z is CD008; not as good as the newer one but I baby it. I'm glad you got it in yourself I wouldn't know where to even start lol. It sounds like a LOT of work

 

I personally wouldn't trust royal purple, heard way toomany horror stories on multiple car forums.

 

It's a ton of work, don't let anyone fool ya!

I only attempted it because my buddy has lots of experience with drag racing old school muscle cars thus he has replaced a few clutches. He doesn't know the inner works of the tranny but fully understands how to wiggle one in or out of a car. Its just normally a much bigger (low tech) car with plenty of room to work (body on frame vs uni-body). He said the biggest difference was the "over engineering" he saw in the Z with everything supported by multiple brackets. There are parts under there that appear to be doing nothing other then getting in your way of accessing yet another part ...for example there are 3 boots to protect the shifter, in his '69 Camaro there would be 1 and it would twice the size but only have 2 screws holding it in place that would make things so much easier.

Doing a project like this makes you realize just how complex your car is, there are hundreds of little sub-assemblies all working together to do one (relatively) simple task.