Now that I have a dead T5, I decided it was a good time to put a t56 transmission in my car. Is my list of parts right?

transmission/bellhousing
lt1 clutch/flywheel
t56 master/slave cylinder
crossmember
shifter

My question is what would be the best thing to do for the speedometer? does this work right for what I want, or am I better off buying an electrical speedometer and putting that in my car?

 

The first thing you need to do is read this thread. It will answer most of your questions about a T56 swap from people that have done it already including me. There are also other alternatives for the cable drive speedometer problem beside the cable-x box. PM me if you need help on this.

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/tran...ap-thread.html

 

Yep, I've probably read that thread through 3 times now. I've also read the tech article, and searched for other people's swaps. I'm just making sure I didn't miss anything.

Has anyone tried to cut out the original speedometer an putting an aftermarket one in it's place?

 

Well then your way ahead of the game reading through the T56 thread. A lot of time and hard work went into writing that article. Many different ways to solve problems and different points of views expressed and it's great that so many have taken their time to contributed to the thread.

If your car still has the computer and you put in an aftermarket speedo then you will have driveability problems since the computer does not know vehicle speed, and when the car is stopped. I don't know any way of bypassing this other than putting a carb on the motor, but that really opens up another can of worms.

I chose to develope the mechanical speedometer drive conversion instead of relying on an electronic gizmo to drive my speedo. It's been over a year now and at least 12,000 miles on my car since the swap and everything is working beautifully for me, and about 50 others I've done the mod for. The T56 is the second best thing I've done to my car after installing SFC's. You won't ever regret doing it.

 

Thank you very much! I may be contacting you in a few weeks.