Aristo swap: making the sport shift work on your GS3
 

this is how i went about it. i will try to explain in detail as best i can, i didnt take as many pics as i should have to bare with me.
what you need to buy:
sport shift steering wheel (obviously) i got mine on ebay from a 99 GS4
98-00 GS4 or 01-05 GS3 clockspring. mine was from a 01 GS3 also from ebay.
some wire, and connector pins for the plug from the body to the clockspring.

remove your stock steering wheel, column trim and clockspring. if you swapped a aristo engine into your car i shouldnt need to go into detail about how to do this ;)

once you have that stuff off, look at the plug going into the clockspring that is black, you will see at the end there are 2 pins missing. you will need to salvage a few pins from a spare connector so you can hook wires up to these two. i had some subaru ecu pins laying around from another project and they worked fine.
now if you have the airbag off and you look at the wires in the steering wheel, you will see the wires for the sport shift buttons, they are on the left side of the connector if its plugged into the clockspring. black is shift down, white is shift up. on the connector you will be pinning, shift down will be at the far side of the connector in the empty slot, and shift up will be right next to it.
now since i have an aristo swap like you do, your immobilizer for the chipped key does not work anymore. this is perfect because at the transponder key amplifier there are wires that run from the ign switch area, right out to the ecu already. find the plug for the transponder amp, its right below the back of the ignition switch, 6 pin flat connector black in color. the two wires you want to mess with are blue/red and black/white. i hooked the black/white one to the far pin i put in the body-clockspring connector, which means that wire will tell the trans to shift down. as you might have guessed, i hooked the blue/red to the pin next to it to shift up. i de pinned those two from the transponder amp plug and soldered the extension wires from the body-clockspring plug directly to them, and heat shrinked them.

ok, under the hood in your ecu box, find the gray immobilizer plug that is now not hooked to anything, you guys are in luck cause i actually remembered to take pics of these next steps haha
http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto...28644401_n.jpg
im pointing to the bridge that was inbetween the blue/red and black/white wires on the gray immobilizer plug. forgot to take a pic before i depinned them. oops sorry :rolleyes:

these next two pics will pretty much explain where you put those two wires after you de pin them from the gray connector.
http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto...32108229_n.jpg
black/white (downshift) wire goes here. this is the 2nd plug on the ecu if you are looking at it from the front of the car. the pins dont fit exactly, you will have to mess with them to make them plug into the white plug, or you can simply cut them off and solder on the correct pins from a donor plug. i just fiddled with them till i was able to jam them in, because i wasnt feeling motivated enough to find anymore ecu pins tonight.:p
http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto...70634847_n.jpg
blue/red (upshift) wire goes here. same connector, i did the same as the other one and just shoved it in. she liked it.

thats it, providing you didnt mess anything up, you will now have manual shift control over your trans when you put your gear selector in the "4" position and "3" lights up on your instrument cluster. i assume this happens because our clusters and shifters are for a non sport shift 5spd auto instead of the 4spd we now have.
i am going to borrow the cluster from my buddies GS4 with sport shift and see if the gear indicator works to tell you what gear you are in, IE 1-2-3-4. im not sure the GS3 is wired for this, or if the ecu can talk to the cluster to make this work, but i will report back when i get a chance to try this!
for now, im just counting gears and loving my sport shift! :woohoo:

if you get in over your head feel free to PM me, and if there is enough demand ill take my dash back apart and get some more pictures.
Mike

Thanks for the great info.

got the chance today to borrow a GS4 cluster and plug it in, much to my suprise and excitement, the gear position indicator under the speedometer works! i had my doubts since the GS3 isnt wired for the sport shift, but somehow it can talk to the GS4 cluster and output the gear positions... pretty cool!

This is pretty cool. I think I will attempt to do this down the road. Are you able to keep the car in gear up to redline without the ecu forcing an upshift?

Also, if I'm reading this right, I would just have to put the gear selector into the "4" mark for the car to go into manual mode?

you are correct. put the shifter in 4th and you get manual mode. the trans will not upshift until you hit the button, ecu does not over ride the manual shifting, aka you can bang the limiter and stay in that gear :)

Thanks for the info. Good to hear that you're able to bounce off the limiter when you want to. :D I hate how the transmission automatically upshifts short of redline. Would love to be able to rev out the motor and use that last bit of the rpm band during WOT.

Bumping an ancient thread here, but figure it's better than starting from nowhere. I have an aristo 4 speed in my car now and am unable to manually select third gear or otherwise lock it out of shifting into 4th. It lights up as third gear, but doesn't hold third and will go right into 4th. Is the only solve for this to wire up an "e-shift" solution? Additionally, as I don't have an eshift steering wheel, and don't intend on replacing mine with one, is there any reason I couldn't simply wire up a manual switch in lieu of the steering wheel controls?

I believe so. I only get 1,2 and 4. 3rd isn't available via the stock shifter. OP, can you rehost the images for wiring the eshift?

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.clu...749456b50d.png

Plug number is F59
SFTU is for shift up. pin 4 on the plug
SFTD is fr shift down. pin 14 on the plug

If you don't want to change your steering wheel you can use momentary switches connected to ground on one end and to these corresponding pins on the other end.

Basically a ground input to these pins would have the desired effect of shifting up or down. :bigok:

Great info! Thanks for sharing. Wondering though if there is any way to maintain the gear. So let's say I shift it down into 3rd, is there any way to keep it from directly upshifting afterward, outside of holding hard down on the skinny pedal?

If you select a certain gear by shift lever or M mode, it will only shift to the highest gear you select, it won't shift up unless you command it to.

http://my.is/forums/3920580-post8.html
The e-shift gear indicator does NOT, again does NOT, indicate which gear you are in - it indicates the HIGHEST gear that the car will shift UP to.

Once you understand this, all these things become clear:

1) The car does NOT go into 5th gear when you switch from D to M - It stays in whatever gear you're in! But the indicator now shows the highest gear the car will shift to, 5th. If you never touch the buttons, driving in M is exactly like D! You can bounce back and forth between D and M while you're driving, the car won't shift - it just "turns the buttons on".

2) The car always starts in 1st from a stop, but no, you can't select it with the buttons. You can drop to 2 - but this doesn't mean the car starts in 2nd gear, it means the car will shift to 2nd on it's own, then stop. It won't go past 2nd. So no, you can't do a 1-2 shift with the buttons (you need to move the lever from for that).

3) The car will downshift on its own regardless of the indicator position. The indicator only shows the highest gear the car will shift to automatically, not the lowest.

EDIT: I did some testing today.

Selected "L" which is 1st gear manually by moving the shifter all the way down and to the right. Accelerated to 20mph and on my car (3.77 gears so your RPMS might differ) the RPMs hold at 3400 RPM. This setting holds 1st gear and won't shift up. If you hit redline, it will just bang the rev limiter till you select "2" by bumping the shift to the left.

Stopped the car and repeated in e-shift mode where "2" is displayed on the screen. You DO start out in 1st gear, but it will shift up to 2nd by itself at 3000RPM UNLESS you go more than 50% throttle. (It kind of has a snow mode trans shift map for this) If you accelerate to 20mph slowly it will shift to 2nd really quick and on my car the RPMs are now at only 2000 RPM at 20mph. If you floor it, it will wait till redline to shift to 2nd.

So bottom line, we can't hold 1st gear in e-shift. It kind of sucks for low-speed turns when you want to hold it.
If you watch any completely oem JZ161 (2nd Gen) Aristo videos, they can select gear "1" with e-shift and it shows up as such in the display.
I don't know if they can hold gear.
We didn't get to hold 1st gear probably because of emissions and probably engine/transmission safety. They knew people would probably do this more than with the manual gated shift option because it'd be easier.
Makes sense because they discontinued it in the V8 altogether in 2001 because it was a V8 to begin with, as well as having more displacement in this year going from 4.0L to 4.3L

I have a 99 gs3, and I am going NA-T with it. Am I able to make sport shift work on this car, or do I have to swap a different transmission in?

Sorry for reviving an old post but does anyone have the pics that were posted? I want to do this mod but none of the pictures came up

download the plugin that will bypass photobuckets garbage....