One of the great things about this car is the access to the clutch. Almost everything is accessible from the wheel well and the only thing you need to get under the car for is to drain/fill the transmission and to disconnect/reconnect the clutch linkage. After draining and disconnecting, I removed the transfer case cover to expose the drop gears. The engine output shaft is connected to the top gear and the transmission input shaft is the lower gear. The ring nut on the lower gear needs to be removed with the special ring nut tool. The nut is torqued to 140 lbs-ft, and I needed a lot of leverage to get it loose. First I tried my air impact hammer, but the nut didn't budge. Then I got out my breaker bar with a really long extension. I used a block of wood to support the extended end and the nut loosened right up.
After removing the nut, I was able to slide off the lower gear. Behind it is a bearing, held on by a snap ring. So far so good. I removed the snap ring, then proceeded to remove all the bolts holding on the bellhousing. The bellhousing was stuck, so I had to make a puller out of a scrap piece of metal to gently pull the bellhousing from the back of the engine.
When the bellhousing pulled away, I grabbed it by hand and pulled it away until...clunk. What the heck? Clunk. I was trying to slide the bellhousing off the transmission shaft, but there was definitely something in the way and I couldn't tell what. I slid the bellhousing back on and looked at the shaft again. Then, I saw it. Far inside at the back of the output shaft was a snap ring. It was hard to reach and the type of ring that I didn't have a tool for. My snap ring pliers are the pin type, and they didn't work on this flat ended snap ring. After trying (and failing) for a few minutes, I heard our dog barking. I looked outside and here comes BG coming down the driveway. What great timing! If anyone had the right pliers, it would be him. Turns out he did have the right pliers (several in fact) and we were able to get this sucker off. With the ring out, the bellhousing slid off with no problem.
SL came by and helped me with the rest of the disassembly. With the bellhousing off, the clutch pressure plate was exposed and it removed easily. This revealed the source of the clutch slip. The clutch friction disc was really worn, It was about half of the thickness of the new one and worn past the wear indicators and almost to the rivets. As I suspected, this car has been driven hard and put away wet. After all, there are only 46K miles on the odometer. Did these people not know how to drive? The clutch disc from my Golf at 100K miles looked almost brand new! Also, there is evidence that clutch has been replace before. That means that the previous owner ran through at least two clutches in 46K miles? Incredible!
As much as I had hoped that I would be back on the road quickly, it was not going to happen. Not only was the clutch fried, so was the flywheel. It's worn pretty badly, and it's a bit discolored from overheating and has small cracks in it. I talked to BG and thinks it's salvageable by resurfacing. He doesn't do this type work in his own shop, but has a guy who does. Hopefully, this will be done in the next few days.
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