Clutch system is driving me nuts!
Thread Starter
Instructor
Joined: Jun 2010
Posts: 152
Likes: 40
From: Queens NY
Clutch system is driving me nuts!
Last weekend I went out for a drive on the highway when my clutch pedal started to get soft at the top. I took an exit near my friend's house and in a matter of minutes the whole pedal was soft and I could barely disengage the clutch. I've dealt with this before, but usually my master cylinder was at fault. This time I couldn't find any leaks or broken parts. It was just soft and not working. I let the car sit in front of my friends house for a week before taking it back to my local transmission shop. I had my friend push my car with his to match into first gear, and shifted through the gears until I arrived at my local shop. When I got there my clutch pedal was completely soft and wasn't disengaging the gears. My mechanic looked at it 2 days later and said everything was working fine, the slave was just not bolted on as tight as it should have been. How can a hydraulic clutch system go from working to not working to working again? I'm running a stage 2 clutch, the fluid passes through a line very close to my longtube header setup. My fluid gets really black/contaminated-looking. Also, this happened after a really long night of rain and my car was parked outside. Does anyone have an idea as to what happened and how I can prevent this from happening again? Any help would be greatly appreciated :/
Safety Car
Joined: Feb 2000
Posts: 4,564
Likes: 110
From: Austin Texas
Sounds more like a slave cylinder issue. That fluid when hot will give you some strange symptoms, and when cool will work as normal. I think I would check out the slave. Easy enough to pull out, and see if the bore is scored.
Flush the line, and fill with something that is rated @ a higher temp than the stock clutch fluid. And try to get it away from the header. I found a place under mine to run a zip-tie around and pull it away. It's a pretty basic system, so there can only be 3 points of failure: 1) Clutch Master, 2) Clutch Slave, 3) Clutch fluid.
The slave & fluid are the "easiest" to look at first. If those don't work, the master is all you have left.
Flush the line, and fill with something that is rated @ a higher temp than the stock clutch fluid. And try to get it away from the header. I found a place under mine to run a zip-tie around and pull it away. It's a pretty basic system, so there can only be 3 points of failure: 1) Clutch Master, 2) Clutch Slave, 3) Clutch fluid.
The slave & fluid are the "easiest" to look at first. If those don't work, the master is all you have left.
