congrats, this is some great news!

 

yeah, originally, they would not supply me w/ a rental car for the week; however, after calmly *****ing the service guy out and hanging up, he calls me back and says that he'll be able to give me one. So, I guess i'm happy for now. If the clutch is burnt though, i'd be a little confused. I drive the car 3 out of every 9 days because i use a truck for work 6 out of every 9 days. Most of the time, my dad ends up driving the car to work. So, unless he races my car in the underground street racing circuit w/o us knowing, I have no clue why my clutch wore out so damn quickly.

 

Update: They took my car apart and looked at the clutch. I asked them to call me when they did, so I took some pics. Luckily, they're still gonna give me a brand new one under warranty. The general manager even told me that if I bought an aftermarket clutch, they'd install it. Here are some pics...

 

That's pretty cooked!
Sniff, sniff, what's that smell?

 

Great find. We need one of those (former Mitsu rally mechanic) in Dallas. I'll bet he has seen some crazy stuff in his time.

EDIT: Just looked at those clutch pictures ... that thing looks awful ... what kind of driving has it been subjected to?

 

Those pictures are very similar of what the clutch in my '03 EVO looked like. The clutch material itself was quite thick and there was no wear that would account for the clutch failure. It seems that some EVO clutches fail like that... The pressure plate would appear to be somewhat weak and the friction surfaces just glaze and the clutch fails to engage.... I had a Exedy twin plate clutch installed but I do not recommend it because it's hard to modulate. It's almost like an off-on switch... I imagine many competition clutches are like that too.... I guess yiou'd better keep it stock, that way they are completely responsable for the job.

 

Well, here's the deal...I work 6 days, then i'm off 3. During the 6 days i work, my father drives the car to work and i drive a truck. I only drive the car 1/3 of the time. And I only maybe one race every 2 weeks. So, I'm really confused at how my clutch is so bad. The service manager asked if I downshift when i slow down and I said "yes." He also was hinting at me racing it at the track, but I don't. I'm really thinking my dad secretly races my car . My friend races his GSX much harder than I race my car and his clutch is still fine...Then again it was replaced by mitsu when he bought the car in 2004. So maybe my replacement clutch will do better...

 

Go and buy an ACT Clutch and give it to them to install.

 

Glad you got that warrantied. Wow, your father must secretly beat the crap out of it if you don't abuse it that much!

 

No, the clutch is not that weak really. The pressure plate simply bottoms out on the rivets before the material is close to being worn off. You can see on the photos where the rivets of the pressure plate have bottomed out. Now the pressure plate is putting all it's clamp load on the flywheel (through the rivets) instead of on the disc. This is why EVO owners often complain about how the clutch seemed to work fine and then within a couple days the clutch can't hold any power at all.

 

Dirk, help me understand.... when you say the pressure plate bottoms out on the rivets, I always took that to mean the rivets that hold the friction material to the clutch disc. But now what I'm reading is that the rivets on the pressure plate are bottoming out. Looking at the pictures, I can see 3 "post" looking things on the pressure plate that could bottom out on the flywheel if the disc was thinner than a new one. There are matching marks on the flywheel were it looks like maybe those 3 "posts" may have bottomed out. Am I seeing this correctly? If so, could you take a stock pressure plate (before the clutch starts to slip), and file these posts down, to give the pressure plate more travel and use up more of the friction material before the clutch goes out? Or am I out in left field?

 

Yes, you are totally correct. It is even worse when the flywheel warps because it always warps in a concave direction away from the disc.

 

THEY CANT VOID YOUR WARENTEE for having a bov.

 

Hilarious

 

Werd to that. Especially if they'll cover the labor to install the ACT. My ACT clutch brought me out of 7 months of clutch purgatory after my stock clutch failed and a brand new Exedy twin disc turned into a nightmare - not necessarily Exedy's fault.

Ask the dealer how many clutch installs they've done. My dealer claimed to know what they were doing when they offered to install my Exedy twin disc to replace my worn out stock clutch (16K). They didn't. The Exedy eventually dragged like a mother for months, and the dealer would just shrug saying "we don't know what to do to troubleshoot it since it's aftermarket". And they wonder why I gave them poor ratings on the last JD Power survey I received (the service manager actually greeted me the other day as "Mr. Smith, he of the savage service survey", and then he smiled - yeah, I feel real comfortable going in now).

I finally couldn't take it any longer and had the Exedy pulled, and put in an ACT using a performance shop for all the work. Man, I wished I had listened to others and gone with the ACT in the first place. Nothing like dropping $3200 in 7 months on clutches.

I ended up sending the Exedy back to Daikin/Exedy in Michigan, and Bernie Solomon of Daikin examined it along with one of Daikin's Japanese engineers. Their diagnosis: installer error. The teeth on one of the discs had some very minor burrs on it that prevented it from engaging/disengaging smoothly/completely. That is usually caused by putting the transmission back and angling it during the install, according to Exedy. The centers of the discs also had some oxidation, showing that the things were starved for lubrication. God knows what the dealer used for lube (supposed to be high temp), or how well they lubed it. And finally the Japanese engineer told me that there was some small evidence of lubricant contamination on one side of one of the discs - again, installer error.

But I must say in Daikin's/Exedy's defense, they went out of their way to help me, offering to ship the clutch back to their facility for inspection, paying for shipping both ways, and called me at home one evening and spending about 15 minutes going over the issues with me on the phone. I was pretty surprised by their helpfulness. Moral of the story - make sure the installer knows what they're doing.