Clutch woes---solved...

[treed2 at wsu.edu (T. Reed)]

> Well, I have no firm idea....  This is my first clutch...  Tranny work has
> always left me cold...
>
>    I 'think' the trouble was that, the clutch began to 'shell', I heard the
> crunch...  I assume this because it began to bind?  Anyways, when I put my
> foot on the pedal, it went to the floor...  And then I could not engage the
> clutch with it running/rolling, even if I pulled up the pedal...  Half the
> friction material went from the clutch plate to dust/debris elsewhere in the
> clutch assembly...  This meant that I had all sorts of slack now that was not
> present before it shelled on the one side...  And/or the clutch was engaged

Yeah; that's what I'm wondering about...

Even if the clutch material was completely gone and there was just the
bare disc, stepping on the clutch pedal should still have the same effect
of moving the pushrod, pushing on the release plate, in turn pushing
against the pressure plate springs and moving the clutch disc away from
the flywheel (stopping power transfer from the engine to the transaxle).

If all the friction material disappeared you would have all kinds of
clutch slippage.

So I'm thinking you might have some other failure in addition to a bad
clutch? (maybe a worn pushrod?) Definitely check that out before you put
it all back together.

Doing a tranny install and a tranny pull (again) in the same day is very
frustrating; don't let it happen to you!

> all  the time because that material was bunched-up in the mechanism...  To be
> honest, I don't know...  I do know that clutches do not look like that unless
> they are blown, that is about it!

I hear that! When I did my first clutch it was absolutely thrashed. All
kinds of black friction fuzz spewing out of it and flaking off in
chunks. The bellhousing was black from the stuff! I measured the disc with
a pair of calipers and I think it was like 3mm below minimum thickness.

-Toby