Here is the deal boys and girls.

I am looking at spending a bit more dosh on the beast say 3/4's of the way through the year aiming for more performance than asthetic mods. The mods I already have are:

-Lowered with springs, kyb struts and adjustable camber kit
-POD Filter in easy boy box and CAI
-Exhaust
-Pacie Extractors
-A few asthetics like tint, mags, clear indicators etc etc


The 2 main ideas I am thinking about are either joining the ever increasing club of manual conversions or getting some cams, probably stage 3. My train of thought is why do the cam work if i don't have the manual to control it and probably loose some of the power to the auto and also if i do a manual conversion later is there a cam for auto and a different one for manaual?

Please feel free to answer my questions, ad ideas/thoughts/advice to my ideas or if there is other mods I haven't written here please feel free to post those up.

Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts

I think you'll find that you will have problems running a stage 3 cam profile without some fuel and ecu upgrades; not to mention fuel economy problems and a pretty rough idle. Not a good idea in a stock auto either. Your best bet would be a stage 1 grind and a bit of headwork.

A manual will take pretty much a full second off your quarter mile time, so go figure in terms of price/acceleration gain. Apparently the stage 3 cams aren't all that practical as stated above, probably stage 2 at max. Personally I'd put a manual box in it before I started playing with the heads.

I think you'll find that you will have problems running a stage 3 cam profile without some fuel and ecu upgrades; not to mention fuel economy problems and a pretty rough idle. Not a good idea in a stock auto either. Your best bet would be a stage 1 grind and a bit of headwork.

I figured/knew i would need ecu upgrades but what do u mean by fuel upgrades?

Also, i don't know much about head work, i know the very basic idea of it. Where would you and what gains would expect?


A manual will take pretty much a full second off your quarter mile time, so go figure in terms of price/acceleration gain. Apparently the stage 3 cams aren't all that practical as stated above, probably stage 2 at max. Personally I'd put a manual box in it before I started playing with the heads.

A full second hey, didn't realise it made that much difference...

So far piv you have said what I was pretty much thinking. Do the manual and if i want that bit more later do the other work.

Also, does anyone know if, what and how much effort it is to get an ex-auto licensed/permitted after the conversion?

i'd go the manual convo straight up.

there's no point going hard core aggressive cams, ecu, fpr, etc when your auto box is going to be eating all of that power....

Ok cool. So its manual first then any other work.

Sort of figured it would come to that conclusion but just wanted to see a few opinions. Just wanted to see if it was worth doing the manual conversion and then seeing what other mods as a maybe down the track or if it was worth saving the $$$ from the conversion and putting it straight into mods.

i'd go the manual convo straight up.

there's no point going hard core aggressive cams, ecu, fpr, etc when your auto box is going to be eating all of that power....

That pretty much the result with me when i had the auto,

also with the rpw stage 1 cams there is a manual and auto grind, auto ones give more torque and the manual ones give top end