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August 2023 - Clutch Issues
My issues initially started when I went for a drive and I realized I was having issues getting the car into gear at high rpm. No grinding, but just felt like a lookout. After that would happen it felt like I would just lose my clutch and couldn't go into gear at all. This would solve itself after just turning the car off and back on and it would be like nothing happened. I tried a bunch of different things including bleeding the clutch, replacing the master and slave, and replacing the pivot pin and throwout bearing. And after all that still the same issue. Well, I went to drive the car again just trying different things to and after dumping the clutch from a stop I heard a grinding noise. Luckily this was maybe a quarter mile away from the house I just limped it home. After pulling the transmission I saw that I had one clutch strap completely fail, with the other 2 being bent. When this happened I was running a 550i pressure plate, stock 128i clutch, and a jbr 12lb flywheel.
I thought it was just a fluke since I only had maybe 1000 miles on the pressure plate. So I replaced it with a fx350 pressure plate with a sprung clutch but reused the flywheel. After installing that and driving the car again it felt like it was much harder to shift. It felt like there was so much extra resistance on the shifter. Well after getting the easy break-in miles, I tried doing some aggressive shifts near redline and it just did not want to go into gear. Same sort of lockout feeling. Well, I kept driving around seeing if maybe I just forgot how to drive but along with this, it felt like there was a lot of extra vibration. I have solid motor, trans, and diff mounts so I was used to vibrations, but it was to the point where above 5k rpm I could barely see out of my rearview mirrors. Well, when I tried to rev with the clutch in I heard a grinding noise and a metal milkshake. I once again limped the car home and when I jacked up the car I found my bell housing got blown apart.
So I replaced the transmission and the pressure plate, but resued everything else. After reinstalling everything and just driving around it still felt like it was hard to shift with excessive vibrations. So I took the transmission out yet again after maybe 50 very easy miles. When I took it off I found the clutch straps to be bent. This time I sent back the pressure plate to get the straps rebuilt and have an extra layer installed.
The only thing I could think of being an issue at this point is my flywheel is misbalanced or bent. I plan on reinstalling the stock flywheel with that rebuilt pressure plate and hoping for the best. Everyone I talked to said they only saw this on people that don't rev match on downshift, but I always do so I don't think it's that. I do have a very aggressive 2-step at 6200 rpm that I can't resist doing when no one is around, so no clue if that could somehow damage the pressure plate. Also one other thing I noticed is if I tried to downshift down to first it would make a whirring noise and just really didn't like it. It never did that before and I had no issues getting into first from neutral.
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