Miata 6-speed transmission?

[Neandertarge]

My Z has been out of commission for a while now, so I've been driving a 99 Miata (with the 6 speed) to get my sports car fix. I was thinking the other day, "wouldn't it be great if i could put this transmission into my z." I did a search and could only find one guy who wanted to put a Miata rear sub-frame into a Z (also a great idea, would allow an easy source of cheap Torsen LSD's) but nothing about there transmissions. It seems strange to me as the maita tranny's gears are well suited to high spinning low torque cars and the 6-speed is known to hold as mush as 450 hp in turbo Miatas with no problems at all. I am relatively unfamiliar with transmission work, is there some critical dimension of the Miata tranny (input flange? pressure plate?) that keeps them from mating up to an L series or any of the common smaller engine swaps? Just kind of thinking out loud here.

[johnc]

Let's see:

 

Bell housing bolt patterns are different.

Input shaft splines are different.

Input shaft length is different.

Miata's use a backbone for transmission mounting while the Z uses a trans mount.

 

That's just the stuff off the top of my head.

[Neandertarge]

I'm not familiar with backbone mounting. Would that be the miatas power plant frame? A bell housing adapter shouldn't be to hard, and i imagine both the spline count and length could be taken care of with a custom input shaft. The unit out of the miata's are modified for rx-7's occasionally. Heres a link to a picture of the miata's input shaft.

http://www.mazdatrix.com/faqpics/MiataInput/3Standing.JPG

 

The miata unit is 15/16" and 22 spline. I couldn't find any data on the Z but an old clutch tool i had lying around has 24 splines.