Club 80-90 Forums

I have an issue with my conversion whereby I drove for approximately 80 miles to an event, and after an hour or so of playing in the mud I found it really difficult to change gears. The setup is an RJES Turbo bellhousing mating a late syncro gearbox to a 2.5 MK4 Legacy engine. The flywheel, friction disc, pressure plate, clutch fork, release bearing and slave cylinder are all new - This is a pull type clutch.

I found that the clutch arm movement was limited so thought I had a slave cylinder problem, so installed a new one and bled successfully only to find it didn't change anything. Given that the cylinder was nearly fully extended I lengthened the push rod but this didn't improve the situation either.

I used a bore scope to check the internals and it appeared as though the bearing was backing out on the bellhousing. So I pulled the gearbox, everything appeared okay so I took some measurements and it appears as though the bearing has only 5mm of motion along the release bearing carrier. From what I have read, the bearing should have a motion of between 10-15mm.

Has anyone ever experienced this? Do I have a problem with the pressure plate maybe? Your help would be very much appreciated. Thanks

which clutch fork is it ? rjes or standard vw
which lever arm is fitted petrol or diesel ?
the RJES fork shaft has 6 splines, if it's a petrol arm it should be fitted on middle 4, if it's a diesel one then it should be fitted 1 spline closer to the slave cylinder, which on a pull clutch will be 1 spline anticlockwise looking at end of shaft
if it's not got sufficient room in the bellhousing to pull back then you will need to relieve the ridges that the fork is touching to provide more room, I haven't fitted a turbo set up to one of the latest batches of bellhousings so don't know if there's any issue with them, in the past I have relieved a few housings subtly to facilitate easy removal of components or assembly but I have always let Richard know when I encountered any issues so he could double check stuff before it goes out to customers

Hi Aidan, thanks for your response, Fred's back in one peice now and is running like a dream I'm glad to say. I fitted a trubo clutch setup with an RJES turbo pull clutch fork and used the splines to position the arm closest to the cylinder. The problem lay with pressure plate, I did some measurements after removing the gearbox and the bearing only had 5mm of movement excluding the dead movement where the bearing pushes and locks into the pressure plate. When I removed the pressure plate, on relieveing pressure equally around all bolts, the fingers snapped back. I drove through a fair amount of deep mud on the day it failed with only the Subaru flwheel guard, which offers very little ingress protection and the bellhousing and clutch was full of crud.

The bellhousing and clutch is clean now and I'm in the process of sealing the bottom of the flywheel and also fitting a drain plug, I've already fitted a high level breather hose. So fingers crossed I won't be seeing my cluctch for some time!