Hey Scotty! I have a 1997 mazda miata with 168,000 miles and i love the car. Recently my automatic transmission has been slipping and Ive been looking into a manual swap. I called 7 shops, 6 shops were uninterested, and 1 quoted me 8-12 thousand!! They called me 2 days leter and said they can do it for 4 thousand if i sourced a few parts. Now that has me question what a job like this should actually cost. Crap like this makes me wish you lived in California.
Forget it. it's not worth it anywhere.
You would need a donor car to swap over all the pieces needed to do the conversion. I've seen that done on other vehicles but it's a a lot of work. Lots of details, wiring harnesses may even be different. Will your Commissars even permit you to do this on a car that needs to be "smogged"?
I remember I saw a video on it:
doable, not that cheap, but doable on these old miatas.
