12. Get on your creeper and under the car, it’s time to remove some stuff down here now. Get an allen head socket and unbolt the axles from the tranny. Using the e-brake to hold the axles from moving is a good idea here while you break these allen bolts loose. If you’ve got a helper, have them sit in the driver’s seat for you to control the e-brake. E-brake up while you break them loose, then e-brake down, rotate, up, break more loose, repeat until they are all loose.

 

13. Remove the shifter linkage. It just pops off the tranny if you have a nice fork type tool. Just put the ball in between the fork and pry lightly. It’s a ball joint style connection. The connections on the fork arms you see in the picture are designed to slide in and then be locked in place by the metal spring things and are common on a lot of cars. On my 996 they slide out of the fork with a flat head screw driver before the springs came off though.

 

14. Remove the positive from the starter. Make sure you've unhooked the battery before this or "you're going to have a bad time"

 

15. You'll want to remove the under body plastics to get access to unhook the drive shaft. There are three underbody plastics under the car in total you’ll need to eventually unhook. I haven’t noted all of the nuts to remove in the pictures because there are tons, but you’ll easily figure it out. They are all 10mm socket heads

 

16. There is a brace connecting the transmission mount to the uni-body. You’ll need to remove that too. There are 4 nuts and 2 bolts holding it in place. The transmission won’t fall, don’t worry. This is just an extra brace to limit movement during use.

 

17. There are 3 bolts for the drive shaft to the transmission. Get it unhooked. After this you'll need to pry lightly and it'll push towards the front of the car and far enough away from your tranny to be out of the way. I used a small pry bar here. Don’t force it, it should just move without much effort.

 

18. There are diagonal sub-frame braces in the back. They run from the rear sub-frame up to about the rear jack stand points. Remove them by removing the nut on the top in the middle of each, and the bolt in the end of each. They are structural braces and don’t hold anything so you should be safe. Once the nut and two bolts are removed you are safe to pull downward. They have a semi-tight rubber bushing holding them in. Just pull downward.


Off the car here is what they look like. Note the two rubber bushings. One has a nut on top, the other is just a locating bushing.

 

19. If you haven’t already, drain the oil, and coolant from the engine before you forget. Also drain the transmission fluid and coolant too. You can theoretically leave the oil and tranny fluid in, but if you plan to remove the tranny, or do almost anything to the engine they will need to be emptied. (If you aren’t doing anything to either, why are you removing the engine?)


20. There is flat brace going from one side to the other of the front of the rear sub-frame. It’s held in by a bolt on each side. Remove them, then the brace and sit it off to the side and out of the way.

 

21. There are a few very obvious coolant lines in the way running under the transmission. There are two small ones that run in a “Z” shape, and two large ones. Unhook all of these. You are likely to make a mess at this point, I'd have a garage mop ready. Now would be the perfect time to mop so it can be drying.

 

22. Time to unhook the clutch slave cylinder. Two 15mm wrenches, and It’s easy to do

 

23. There is a sensor in the front of the transmission. Remove the electrical connector from the sensor

 

24. We are done on the floor under the car for a bit. Let’s get a bit more room to work in the bay, shall we? The engine mounts to the big metal plate you'll see in the back. It’s the same metal plate that the exhaust straps wrapped around. (kind of) The plate bolts into the engine mounts.

The rear sub-frame has a mount running across the middle held in by two bolts on each side. It connects effectively to where the control arms do. Probably a brace to keep the control arm points from flexing under load. Make sure it’s there, we are going to lower the engine to sit on it for a minute.


Sitting the engine on it will give us a good 4 inches in the bay to work and disconnect stuff. The big metal bracket the engine is mounted to is connected to the rubber mounts by a nut on each side. You can access this from the bottom with an extension. Don’t do it yet though! Unlike everything else we’ve unhooked, this time you are dealing with heavy stuff that will fall. You'll want to get a jack under the engine to ensure it doesn’t fall before removing either bolt. Find a safe place on the bottom of the engine and raise your jack until you have light pressure pushing up on the engine. Note too much though, you don’t want to pick your car off the jack stands. Once you have the nuts removed, slowly lower the jack. Your engine will eventually come to sit on the brace. You now have more room up top in the bay to work and shouldn’t have lowered enough to stretch anything.

 

25. Let’s go up top for a bit now. Remove the airbox assembly if you haven’t already. Its only a few bolts and is really easy to figure out. Unhook your intake pipes. These are held in with a kind of neat clip and o-ring setup. Just pull the clip and it'll come right out on both sides with some wiggling

 

26. Unhook the gas feed from the fuel filter on the driver’s side of the bay. Take care not to ruin any lines and use two separate wrenches to hold it in place while turning. Also unhook the coolant overflow tank, and the other two lines I’ve put red marks on below.

 

27. There is one large coolant line on the driver’s side of the engine bay. It’s held in with the same kind of clip mechanism as the air pipes were. Remove it. If you look next to it there is also a smallish coolant hose running towards the bottom of the engine (not shown in the picture) follow it. It ends up connecting to the water pump. You’ll want to remove this hose and pull up and out of the way. Note, mop any mess you make up here too!