Make Your Own Toyota Transmission At Home (Kind Of)

“The transmission works exactly like most manual transmissions found in any car or truck,” explained Harrell. “However, I can barely explain how it works. It’s fairly hard to grasp unless you assemble one or see an animation of one opened up.”

Last year, I wrote Concours d’Angst as a vision of what small-scale manufacturing might bring to the automotive enthusiast landscape. While I was busy imagining the future, however, someone else was busy making it.

It’s a 3-D printed Toyota transmission made of plastic, for use with a similarly small-scale Toyota 22R engine. You can see it work here:

Obviously, this is neither full-sized nor ready to install in any engine of any type. What makes it important is that it was reverse-engineered by someone who was in no way involved with Toyota, or even with transmissions. As 3-D printing transcends technical limitations and becomes a lingua franca for small-scale fabrication of all types, it will become possible for hobbyists to immediately produce full-sized steel transmissions and other complex parts themselves. It will also become commonplace for those designs to be shared. Imagine a world where you could obtain almost any out-of-stock part for any car through this process, and you’ll see the possibilities.

There will be problems of course — how will you be able to be absolutely sure that the transmission in that hundred-year-old ’77 Celica you just paid two million New Dollars for was machined from tool-grade steel? — but those problems will also be solved as time goes on.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wait for somebody to build me a new four-speed 1990 Fox.