This is my first manual car and I've been really struggling to get smooth starts.

Ive only had the car a few months and am finally past the constant stalling phase.

But I've never felt fully comfortable with starts. Too little clutch, too much, same with the gas.

Just took the car for a spin and it's a HUGE improvement. Very easy to feather, I'm consistently finding the bite point and needing very low rpms to pull away.

Took me a while to figure out how to get the spring out. I had a lot if trouble getting the pin out.

But well worth the effort.

 

how about a diy post?

 

how long did it take you to do this upgrade :-) ??

 

I tried to follow the DIY floating around on an old thread. But partially messed it up. Some people said they did it in 10 minutes. It took me at least an hour of fiddling around and cursing before I finally got it out.

1) Take of black vent hose (I presume it's for the air-conditiong) in foot-well right near clutch
2) Unplug electrical connector sitting in front of clutch spring unit. You need to unclip both sides at the same time. Which is a b**tch to do in such a small space.
3) Put wire/nail through tiny hole that sits on bottom of clutch spring unit (looks like a small batter holder). Took me a while to even see where this was. I didn't see it until I finally did steps 1) and 2) above. The wire keeps the spring in place so you can re-use it at a later date.
4) Push/pull out pin at top of spring. Again this took me forever. I eventually figured out you can push on it on the right hand side and move it to the left a bit a bit. And then you have more space on the left side to pull it.

I ended up only getting it partially out and stuck. Luckily I was able to still push the clutch in and out. I threw in the towel and decided the next morning I'd just push it back in and get a mechanic to take the spring out.

The next morning I saw that I had partially dislodged the spring and was able to finally just yank the whole thing out.

 

I did this last year and really helps clutch feel! My clutch catches high and the spring was messing up the feel badly. Only down side is sometimes my cruise will shut off because the top switch is not getting fully pushed in anymore. I rarely use cruise so not a biggie and only happens rarely so doesn't bother me...

 

That's what I have been posting for sometime that it's the best bang for the buck...LOL.

 

I tried this before but I couldnt get the pull out pin out so I gave up. Well after you posted about it today I figured why not try again, and all I can say is this is amazing! I wish I had done this before. The clutch finally feels like a normal clutch. The clutch point is much easier to find and way more consistent.

 

im going to do this aswell

 

Nice! I can only guess the feel would be much better since these cars have such an unbelievably soft clutch feel. Great DIY from the sound of it, but I'd appreciate photos (will look for the other thread).

 

Here's the original DIY thread. The meat of the discussion is pages 1 thru 3.

http://forums.rennlist.com/rennforum...matically.html

 

I'm confused as to what the spring does? I'm not paying 18$ to rennlist to see a pic.

 

My clutch engagement is extremely high as in the last 2" of travel.

How would this effect my clutch feel?

Can I really see the benefit being my clutch is an on/off switch and the engagement point always seams to be changing, but being my clutch engagement is so high would it work for me?


Thanks

Bobby Ali

ba

 

Yes, thats what this mod does to help make it better , a little easier to feel the clutch instead of the on / off..

 

Absolutely 100% it will if you have a high engagement. Once you are under there and see how the spring works, right near the top 20%ish of the travel the spring reverses and pulls up on the pedal.

That is right where my clutch started to engage and made the feel of the pedal horrible! Without spring, you do not have that change in spring pressure on the pedal from down to up, etc.

Takes a bit of time to figure out how to get the sucker out - there really is no good way to explain it from what I remember, just have to get in there and play around and see how it works. It is a strange little German thing I guess!

 

I've got the driveway from hell. Short, a roughly 30 ++ %incline ending with a rolling incline 10 foot section that ends at a road on a hill with fast traffic around a blind corner. In fact I need a mirror at the road on the right hand side to see oncoming traffic.

Feathering the clutch and slowly crawling is so much easier after this mod.