I am rebuilding my shifter. The exhaust has been on for about 100k miles. I'm planning on reusing it so I'm being careful. The biggest offending component is the bushing where the selector shaft goes into the transmission. I can see where it is almost non existent. I can hardly get into reverse. I ordered the parts from Blunttech.

There used to be a write up on this on this site but it seems to have disappeared. Anyone have the link?

I'm guessing it will take about three evenings to do this. I broke one exhaust manifold stud and will have to drill out the stud remnants. We did the shifter rebuild on an e30 and it made a huge difference but didn't have to deal with the aging exhaust problem.