The clutch saga....
Yesterday morning my husband Chuck and I, acording to everyone's advice,
went to bleed the clutch hydraulics. The car made it to the parts
store fine, with a little trouble shifting on the way home. We bled
the clutch according to Scott's instructions (we'd never done brake or
clutch bleeding before.) All excited, we get in the car for a test
drive and it's WORSE. We can't get the car in gear at all! So we
decide to reconvene at 5 in the afternoon to try again with a smaller
hose so we can really see bubbles.
We arrive at the car at 5 and notice that one of the rear tires is flat :(
No big deal you say. Well, it turns out that the jack and spare are
in the trunk and the lock on the trunk is stuck! Chuck tried drilling
out the lock on Saturday but the barrel won't come out. I think he's
already spent a total of 10 hours trying to get the lock unstuck already
(that's a long story -- it was stuck before, we got it unstuck, Chuck
made a piece for it in the machine shop, it worked for about a month,
but the piece he made was too flimsy, so he tried to bend it and made
it too short and the only recourse was to drill.)
Fine. So the tire is flat. The trunk is stuck. (almost funny by this
point, eh?) We work on the clutch anyway this time following the
bleeding instructions in the Haynes manual. IT STILL SEEMS WORSE!
Tensions rise. Each of us is convinced that the other one must be doing
something wrong (I am pumping the clutch, he is bleeding.) By evening
we're not speaking.
So for a moment there, the integrity of our marriage was shakey, but
we're gonna try again this afternoon. How hard can it be to bleed the
clutch? Are we two bozos, or what? Maybe there's something wrong with
the hydraulics and we've exacerbated the problem. Or the throw-out
bearing's really gone bad. Luckily, the bearing, clutch disk and
pressure plate are all under warranty, so we're not sweating as much as
we could be.
Sigh. I'll keep y'all posted.
Lydia gregoret@cgl.ucsf.edu
|