Well this saga has been going on for almost nine months now... my clutch failed suddenly and without warning in november of last year.

I did all the repairs I could in my driveway to try to solve the problem (master and slave cyl, bleeding), but finally had to bring it to a shop to have them pull the transmission.

I got it back today and they gave me a box with the old clutch parts - the clutch plate had broken apart into a bunch of pieces and there was a lot of scoring on the pressure plate from all this metal flying around in there, and it had somehow damaged the throwout bearing and pilot bearing (?) and they apparently had to resurface the flywheel as well. I should be able to post pics of the parts later.

I asked the mechanic, and he said he didn't really know why this would happen. Any ideas?

The only thing I can think of is that my throttle linkage return spring broke a while ago, and I had to stop the engine which was stuck at a high RPM, killing it by slowly letting out the clutch against the breaks.

Also, I thought this was related to my clutch failure, but it turns out to apparently not be, as it is still happening - when at a stop, with the car in neutral and the clutch pedal up, there is a sort of tick tick tick tick rattling sound, sort of like a quiet jackhammer (if there could be such a thing), in sync with the RPMs of the engine. It seems to come from the area of the transmission, in the back of the engine.

I thought that it might have been related to the clutch, but now that everything has been replaced, it is still making that sound. It goes away if you press in the pedal and let it out, sometimes needing to press it in and out a couple times for it to go away.

__________________