Hello all. I'm George, and here on behalf of my friend alex who has a crappy, crappy neon. That's not to say I think all neons suck, but his is a total piece. It's a 96, white with these odd blue and green strip like things on the side. The left side fog light is hanging by it's wire, the radio shuts off on it's own, and it's an automatic! The only thing it has going for it is that it has the DOHC engine. So we want to make it cool, first we have to convert it to a manual, cause man does this tranny suck. I was wondering if you guys knew what manual transmissions I could use to swap into this car and how much and difficult it would be. Thanks.

 

The first thing I would do is get all those electrical problems fixed. The last thing you need is to put the money into the tranny swap and the car is determined totalled because the electrical system was destroyed by a frayed wire. Perhaps try swapping the radio with an aftermarket.

 

The radio isn't a problem, the dash shutting off randomly is a problem. Any idea on that one?

 

Start checking ground wires. Project neon just developed a severe electrical problem this weekend also. Not sure what is causing the problem but somthing spiked and blew the fuse for the fuel pump. Fortunatly he was at my house when it happend. Now we have to spend time and money on that instead of making it faster.

 

You've got the slowest of all the Neons built. The dreaded DOHC ATX. However, there is a cure that wouldn't require a complete tranny swap. If you are willing to spend some money you could build up the ATX with several things, such as a performance valve body, a rebuild kit, limited slip diferential among other things. But most people do swap the transmissions out.l

 

Not interested in a better automatic, it's still missing a pedal. What does the swap entale other than tranny, pedals, clutch, shift cables? Any computer stuff I need to worry about.

 

Nope, that's pretty much it. Maybe a few sensors and such. I don't really know, I'm an ATXer myself. And I prefer it that way.

 

You can run with the ATX PCM for a while but you will want to get a PCM for a manual as soon as you can. The PCM is part of the problem with the DOHC ATX cars, because they have the same rev limit as the sohc cars. The DOHC motor wants to rev and you will be much happier with the I believe 7200 rpm redline of the MTX DOHC PCM.

 

Uhhhhhh, what's a PCM? I'm drawing a blank. Is it a fancy term for ECU?

 

Yah, Chrysler's have a Powertrain Control Module (PCM) not a ECU.

~Amanda