[njsteve]

No good deed goes unpunished!

I have been driving the old viper to the gym every morning for the past couple weeks (when the weather was good) just to use up the 24 gallons of two year old gas in the tank. I was down to half a tank after going 90 miles so far. (7 mpg?)

Last week my son finally decided to ask me to teach him how to drive a manual transmission. Since he has eyes on getting this vehicle one day he better know how to drive it. We took it around the neighborhood and he didn't do half bad. The funny thing about using this car to teach manual transmissionship (if that's a word?) is that it has soooo much torque, you can't really stall it out by letting the clutch up too abruptly. So he did reasonably well for the mile he drove it.

Then comes this morning when I was going to go and fill her up with 93 premium after siphoning out the old gas/Stabil mix. I went to push in the clutch and it felt very low and ineffective. And it wouldn't go in to gear with the car running.

So I did a little research and it is either one of two things: The clutch master cylinder on the firewall...or the throwout bearing slave cylinder in the bellhousing. One is a half hour job and the other is a 8 hour job.

I opened the master cylinder filler cap and it was empty of fluid inside. I added some and could see it took a while to fill so it must have gone somewhere. No puddles under car anywhere. I tried bleeding the system but it didn't get any better.

I ordered both parts from amazon and we will see in week which one it was. I'm doing the master cylinder first since it only took a few minutes to get it out of the car although I did have to grind down an old 5/8" open end wrench to make the tool to release the fluid coupling at the bellhousing.

I did perform an autopsy on the old clutch master cylinder and a lot of black liquid came out (versus the clear fluid that came out of the bellhousing bleeder screw.) So maybe it is just the master cylinder that pooped out. But you know how my luck goes.

Fingers crossed!