Updating you on the DIY. Holy. Shit. I understand why the average labor cost for this job is ~1k now. Took me and 1-3 friends, over a span of 2 days, 20 hours to change the bearing. Literally spent all weekend doing that. Celebrated with a Five Guys burger at 10pm Sunday night, haha!
Granted this is the first time I've removed the transmission from this car, so someone with more experience could probably get the job done much faster. Dallin says he can do it in ~3.5 hours, but he's done the job multiple times, and has all the proper tooling to get something like that done fairly quickly.
Because there's so many parts that need to be removed, I can understand your concern about not wanting to mess something up. After we had everything removed, and we were laying under the car trying to wiggle the transmission off, I was scared shitless that I was either going to 1) be crushed by the transmission and die under the car, or 2) never have the car run the same way again.
In terms of how hard the actual job was, I'd give it a 6 out of 10. Nothing was incredibly difficult. Everything up to the point of removing the transmission was actually pretty easy, we were just taking out time. The bolts that hold the starter on are a pain to reach, but that was about it. Once the transmission's out, the hardest thing is putting it back in. Then just put back everything that was taken off. There's just a lot to take off.
After dropping the car and starting it, clutch pedal was butter smooth. I even had a hard time figuring out where the clutch made contact, because it was just so damn smooth. The only problem, which I ran into today, was not adjusting the reverse lockout plate correctly, and I wasn't able to use first gear on the way home from work. :p I just removed the center console again, adjusted it properly, and now its fine. Took about 30 minutes.
So there's you go. A novel. If you're the kind of person that doesn't let other people work on your car, you feel you have the tools and bodies to help, and your patient enough to take your time to ensure quality care is taken, I'd definitely recommend doing it yourself. If you don't have the right tools, but still want to wrench on the car, I'd hit up Dallin, and just let him know you're willing to help because you want to learn. If you don't want anything to do with it, I'd still hit up Dallin, haha. He'll charge you, but it won't be nearly as much as a dealership.
If you hit him up, let him know Kyle (@bwaaap86) sent you.
