[Formulajones]

It depends on the car. I can do a typical f body or a body for $3500-ish. It depends on what the owner wants.

I can shorten driveshafts and rebalance cheaper than new shafts, but if you want a new shaft we may as well upgrade it to seem less steel tube and better ends so it'll at least take a little abuse. Those shafts run $600-ish with solid Spicer joints.


Clutches I can just simply put a 26 spline disc in and leave the rest of it if it doesn't show issues, that's about $100 for a disc. I find most owners want to change the whole clutch, now you're getting into $500-$600 additional. Then they want to add hydraulics when the mechanical is perfectly fine.

Cross members I modify unless you want something aftermarket.
Speedo is easily handled with a short cable extension and adapter for the Ford style speedo gear. Some guys just want to change out the whole thing or use a gps setup for a fancy speedo, all that stuff just adds cost. Most of it isn't necessary.

We are talking about 4 speed cars here, much cheaper to do that swap.

For instance my 69 Z28 is a factory m22 car. Since we drive it everywhere including my wife dailying it fairly regularly, I wanted the 5 speed to mainly cut down on the wear and tear. It's a simple drop in with no modifications.
Since it was a fine spline I didn't touch the clutch. I didn't want to modify the original driveshaft so I had a nice steel shaft made with solid joints $600. I didn't want to modify the factory cross member so I bought a drop in aftermarket piece, $300. A simple speedo cable extension and a round bar shifter to look like the factory piece pops up in the stock console perfectly. Didn't cut a thing on the car. I had it all done in a day. At the time the tko was $2200. I was in the whole thing with tax and all for $3400-ish and considering what it did for the car it was well spent. The 2.87 1st gear really woke it up and the .64 5th allows me to cruise 75-80 mph at 2300. Darn thing knocks off 21 mpg and is super nice on long trips.
I own other 5 speed swaps that cost more as they get more involved but again, I'd gladly spend $4500-$5000 to do these swaps just because the driving experience isn't even a comparison to anything less. I still have another one I'll do when I get around to paying attention to that car more. It's another 4 speed so pretty straight forward.

When I can tie up $2000-$2500 in a Muncie and it doesn't improve anything it just makes more money sense to do the upgrade.

Ive even gone the auto overdrive route on some of our other cars and kick myself for not doing those sooner. That gets a little more spendy.