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Sunday, April 19, 2015

Caught Red Handed...Maybe

I did some further investigation of the cause for the groove in the clutch release bearing. Turns out all I had to do was point my camera at my clutch. Outside of the fact that this is the strangest looking clutch that I've seen and that a new one is also about double the cost of the MK2/3 clutches, I have concluded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the two items in questions were coming into contact.
The damaged release bearing...definitely salvageable. Haven't looked at the tan stuff yet; contributor?

The clutch with the rounded off bolt heads.
With that questions answered, could it be the cause my noise problem in the video in my previous post?  My doubt that this is the cause (outside of it looking like "fresh" damage) is that it only occurred in first gear when driving. When I pushed the clutch in (you can hear that in the video in the immediately previous post) or pulled into another forward gear the noise was gone. I would think that the clutch or the release bearing would not move fore-to-aft based on gear selection, but I'm not too sure. The motor is still in the car so I reached down into the passenger compartment to snap this picture...haven't gotten my hands on it. Any thoughts/opinions would be very much appreciated.

Beyond my doubts, my gut tells me that I have my smoking gun here...now I have to solve it. I'm concerned about the interference fit where there shouldn't be one, of course, though I'm at a loss right now on what would have caused it. Like I said, I didn't think there was a whole lot of fore-to-aft play in clutch attachment and transmission/engine mate-up. Guess we'll see!

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