Shift light! I bought a cheap one on eBay, looks like this:
I hid it inside the dash since it's big and ugly and there was space in there- a little hole saw work lets me see it:
I can still reach the back to adjust it, although I'll have to wait until the car actually runs again to see if the tachometer wire I spliced into gives it the signal it wants.
I put the car up on the lift, drained the oil, suspended the engine with a ratchet strap, and dropped the subframe down enough to get the oil pan off:
Then I fished around in the pan with a magnet until I stopped getting gear chunks. I pulled out about a half dozen "hauls" similar to this:
Then, to make sure that any bits I missed don't go anywhere important, I put enough magnets on the engine to give the Insane Clown Posse a stroke. Big bar magnet on the oil filter:
New magnetic drain plug, and another bar magnet on the pan. The bar magnets are really strong, so I just put a little epoxy putty at the ends and let them pull themselves down and squish it:
Then I put the pan back on, subframe back up, and motor mounts back on. The distributor (I'm using my spare since it seems to have better bearings than the one that stripped) needed to be drilled out for the new gear's larger roll pin:
Shiny:
Then... I got hung up. I removed the old aux shaft bearing using my typical technique of cutting a slot in it and popping it out- usually after that, I pull my new bearing out of the freezer, line it up, and just tap it in with something heavy. For whatever reason the new bearing is having none of that E36 M3 this time, it gets like a third of the way in and then cocks and pops itself back out of the bore. I'm hoping that leaving it in the freezer overnight and hitting the block with a heat gun prior to installation will let it get in there, since there's not enough room for any real press type tool with the engine in the car.
