I tried looking at this little wonder in action; it isn't easy to see exactly what its doing but I think that as the pedal is depressed the spring both coils and lifts, pivoting on the outer ends while the loop in the middle moves with the pedal arm. At a certain point the loop is at a right angle to the pedal arm, past this point it pushes instead of pulling. Or pulls instead of pushing, just depends on how you look at it.

But there seems to be a fair amount of lateral deflection in the coil in addition to the winding up. At a guess that's what causes it to break - someone spec'd the spring for one motion and forgot the other. Or maybe they bought it from the same supplier as the painted coupe tops.

For heavens sake, GM is perfectly capable of making valve springs that flex upwards of 3,000 times per minute for years! Not to mention the composite leaf springs that support the car! And what lead someone to think that people who are buying a high-performance car with a manual transmission are going to mind a little more pedal effort?

I think that when (not if) mine breaks I'll see if I can't cook up some sort of simple return spring that supplies a few pounds of force to hold the pedal up - unless some enterprising forum vendor is selling such an item by then! Hint, hint!

 

i seriously don't think this spring has dual action, the reason i am saying that is this. if you attempt to put the spring in you have to stretch the spring the most (help reduce cluth effort) if the pedal isn't depress. as the clutch is depress even half way down you will still have to stretch the spring just not as much. if you continue to depress the clutch pedal and attempt to put in the spring you will notice the requirement to stretch the spring decress. when you get the the bottom of the clutch travel (clutch all the way down on the floor) the spring still need to be stretch to be install, but the stretch requirement is the least at this pedal position. this really leave me to conclude since the biggest age group of covette owner is 50-60 years old, it is GM's way to help reduce the complaint of heavy clutch effort. please no offense to this age group. someone try what i just describe, and see if you get the same discovery as i do. thanks

 

mine fell out months ago, probably around 6 months or so. actually i think it broke in half and one half fell out then later the other half fell out since both times i found a-la-spring on my floorboard it was just half. After reading that the pedal assist spring is 'supposed' to act as a return spring and make sure the pedal is in the full up position to uncover the 'port', I have used my foot to try to pull the pedal up further to no avail. my pedal seems to be returning to it's full up position without the aid of the failed spring.

 

So that's what that was!

I found the spring on my floor when I was vaccuming one day and kept it just in case!

 

Umm, I removed mine on my C5 about 20k miles ago and have noticed no problems other than the clutch no longer sticks to the floor, it engages when it's supposed to and doesn't have a funky feeling to it.