Clutch catastrophe

[jdh00]

I know this is hard to diagnose by reading text, but here goes... I just finished up a clutch job on my 92 mtx. I purchased Josh T.'s video and took the job slowly, over the course of three weekends, this included suspension work as well. Today I am driving to work and have not gone over 3k rpms, I want to break it in with stop and go driving for ~100miles. So I am in 4th gear and I hear this "pop". The pop is muffled and is definitely in the engine bay. Now all it does is act like it's in neutral, while in gear. I can depress the clutch and the clutch cable seems to be intact. My question is A) If the clutch cable broke, wouldn't this cause the clutch to be engaged indefinitely? This wouldn't let me go in and out of gear, right? and B) Could the pressure plate straps be faulty and may have snapped? Again, this would cause the clutch to engage indefinitely, right? If so, I would not be able to select gears like I am able to.

I am getting the car towed to my house and will be able to take a closer look there. I wanted to get some quick opinions on here first though. I really hope I don't have to pull the subframe/transmission again, I will if necessary though. Ok, I'm rambling... Thanks in advance for any assistance.

<small>[ May 19, 2003, 08:30 AM: Message edited by: jdh00 ]</small>

 

[MeShoHorny]

Check your half-shafts. Sounds like one of them might have popped out of the trans-axle. Are you getting a RPM reading on the tach? Does the car shift normally but does not move? If so it's the shaft/s for sure.

Don't forget to check the fluid after you pop it back in.

HTH,

 

[jdh00]

Wow, I hope that is what it is. I triple checked everything in the disc/pp/flywheel area, as far as torque specs, loctite, etc... I didn't replace the circlip on the end of the shaft, that's probably where my fallacy lies, correct? The clip didn't look malformed but I'm assuming the potential for it to be damaged during removal is always there. I'm having it brought to my house, I can't wait to crawl under there. Thanks for the reply!

 

[slickn56]

Could also be a differential problem.....

 

[sdpatt]

Are you sure the shifter stabilizer rod didn't come loose or break off the transaxle? Even if the clutch weren't disengaging, you would still get a grinding trying to move the shifter into reverse or other gear (with force). You didn't answer if you had a reading on the speedometer while the car is stationary.

 

[jdh00]

Ok, thanks for the replies guys. I got the car back in the driveway today and up on stands. I removed the passenger side wheel and found that the halfshaft was disconnected from the inner cv joint. Now my question is, is there a possibility the halfshaft wasn't pushed far enough into the cv joint at the factory? I'm thinking it was just thrown in there and the circlip wasn't allowed to do its job. Next question, my alignment is completly outrageous (which isn't a surprise) I replaced the LCA's, swaybar endlinks, steering rack and outer tie rod ends. Could my lack of education around steering geometry and incorrect setup cause a wheel to turn too much? I'm assuming this is possible and could be the cause of the halfshaft becoming disconnected from the inner cv joint. Can you defeat a circlip's holding power by a steady pull, such as hyper-steering angle, or does it take a sharp "whack" to defeat this sort of mechanism?

 

[Doug Waschenko]

It is apparently very common for one of the drive shafts to not be fully engaged (poped out).
Unbolt the ball joints, pull both shafts completely free and reinstall them and see what happens before you go any further.
This fixed the problem for me.