84Z51J

Greetings and salutations, fellow C4nicators!

I recently began to notice a very irritating "cricket chirp" in my drivetrain, both at idle and at speed. It's hard to hear from the cockpit going down the road, but when passing under bridges, between buildings and trees, or sitting in traffic, I can hear the high-pitched squeak bouncing off everything around me...makes for a very embarrassing cruise

I also noticed that when I apply pressure to the clutch pedal (4+3 manual), the noise goes away. I don't even have to fully disengage the clutch; as I begin to press down, the pitch gets higher, then subsides entirely at less than an inch of pedal travel. If I "ride" the pedal a little I can drive quietly again, but I'm not satisfied with that solution for obvious reasons.

At first I thought it might be either the throwout or input shaft bearing, but from what I've read, if one of those is going bad, they only tend to "speak up" when the clutch is disengaged (pedal pressed), and I have the opposite dilemma...a little pressure quiets it down.

I've been doing a lot of research this afternoon, and I think I'm headed in the right direction, but I wanted to see if any of our members have encountered (and resolved) this issue. I didn't find any posts here with my symptoms, but did see some on other car forums. They pointed to possible issues with the clutch fork and pivot ball contact area needing to be greased, and engine vibrations causing noisy rubbing between components, rather than it being a bearing on its way out.

So, has anyone else run into this maddening squeak? If you fixed it by throwing a bunch of parts or a full trans rebuild at it, I'm glad your problem is resolved...but that won't be much help to me. I don't get all that much time to work on the car, so before I do, I like to be reasonably confident that I've narrowed down and diagnosed the real source of the problem