One can take a maxims a bit too far. One of mine is if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Just exactly when is a clutch considered “broken”? When it starts chattering, because it’s fouled by oil leaking from the engine rear end seal? That was like four years ago. When it starts slipping on cold days? That was like two years ago. When it sometimes won’t release fully when trying to engage first gear when stopped? That was at least a year ago. When you have to turn off the engine in order to get it into gear when starting off? In traffic?
OK, OK…it really did need replacing. And seeing how the rivets had became part of the friction material and dug a solid groove in the pressure plate, yeah; I guess it really was broke.
Time to call Willie, my wily, willing, sometime wayward but always cheerful mobile mechanic. He totally redid the brakes on my old F100 two years ago, and they’ve never felt better. Yes, they were really broken, as in only the rears were actually still working. Last summer he redid the brakes on the xB, which…really were broken too. And here he is digging into the xB.
He strongly encouraged me to replace a slew of other front end parts while he had it apart, like the flywheel, axles, control arms, tie rod ends, clutch slave and master cylinders, and related seals and such. But they’re not broken! Ok; yes, it probably makes sense given how easy they will be to replace them now instead of waiting until they actually are broken. And who wants to experience a broken ball joint or such on a back road?
My 2005 xB only has a mere 128k miles on it, but they are all very hard miles: almost 20 years of either city driving or driving out to remote trail heads, which means lots of time on rough forest roads that invariably have massive craters in them. And given my propensity to drive briskly on these gravel roads, I usually don’t have enough time to evade them Kapow!! This happens over and over. It’s why I installed softer springs and yanked out the anti-sway bar; at least it’s not quite as tooth-rattling hard anymore.
Never mind the week I spent bouncing and crashing along with several 4×4 Tacomas and a Jeep Wrangler across the deserts and mountains of Nevada. It only got stuck once, in a deep water hole. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a vacation for the xB.
Yes, it’s had a hard life, and those 128k miles are probably equivalent to some 300k miles of more typical driving conditions. But it’s never let me down. The only actual repair (except for normal wear items) has been a leaky water pump. It’s a keeper.
Actually I did toy with the idea of getting a new car but I just can’t work up any enthusiasm for anything else. It’s crazy; I’m at a point in my life where I could easily afford almost anything and I just have no more desire for one. I love this little box; it’s so compact but roomy and it eagerly nips through traffic and into any parking spot. I feel like a rabid minnow in a sea of walruses in traffic. And its so tossable on those back roads.
My endless drifts through the curves on these familiar gravel roads did eventually bite me last summer, when in a moment of emotion-triggered inattention I slid off the edge of one into a protruding downed tree trunk, putting this nice crease in its side. But I just picked up a couple of junkyard doors to replace them with. And I’m seriously pondering a vinyl wrap as the non-clear coat paint is getting beat up and very dull. Something a bit out of the ordinary…
Here’s a closer look at that clutch disc. One can see the weird wear marks from the oil-induced chattering and the rivets that have been exposed for some time. I could make the chattering go away for a while by purposely slipping the clutch hard, but that of course also made it wear more too. A failed spring apparently was causing the issue of it not releasing at a stop. Somewhat oddly, that problem never surfaced when shifting on the go, but then who needs a clutch when doing that anyway?
The rivets dug quite a little groove into the pressure plate. I failed to get a shot of the flywheel, but I assume it wasn’t much better.
Here’s the new clutch installed. I got an OEM Aisin clutch and the flywheel was from LUK. Parts for this car (all from Rock Auto) are cheap (mechanically it’s a Toyota Yaris), so I wasn’t going to cheap out on the actual parts. Everything including the new control arms, tie rod ends (Moog), axles (Trakmotive), clutch master and slave cylinders (Aisin) and a bunch of seals and such totaled right at $700. I’m not allowed to tell you what I paid Willie, but I always have to make him take more than what he asks for. Let’s just say it was extremely reasonable (in the high three figures), although the whole job did take almost two weeks to finish up. Willie works…when he feels like it, which is why he doesn’t work in a shop. A square peg in a round hole; he learned that quickly. He’s always juggling other jobs and such. I had other cars to drive, so no problem.
But he’s meticulous and the new clutch feels…utterly fantastic. At first I couldn’t believe the difference: it engages so firmly and positively yet so smoothly.
And the whole front end feels so tight and solid; I didn’t realize how loose and sloppy it had become. Not surprising, really. I’m really enjoying driving it again, but I have to be a bit more careful about not chirping one of the front wheels on a takeoff. Before, it was the clutch that did the chirping.
Now I just need to get Willie back here to install those two doors…
Related CC Reading
Auto-Biography: The xB EXBRO Overland Edition Is Finished and Ready For Off-Road Adventure by PN
Nevada Overland Trip (EXBRO5), Day 1: Alkali Flat Hot Springs To Pine Creek by PN
Groovy! Always nice when you get the full use out of your car parts before they wind up on the junk pile. And as always your lack of rust is impressive.
We’re dreading buying a new vehicle, our daily driver fleet ranges from 2007 to 2016 and there’s nothing new that we find compelling.
Always wanted one of these. (well, Still do).
Wow. That IS some “wear” on the clutch alright. But like saying goes:
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it., and if it IS broke, don’t fix it until you really, REALLY have to, and only then, if you have the time (and or money).”
(Something like that).
“It’s crazy; I’m at a point in my life where I could easily afford almost anything and I just have no more desire for one.” Great thought; we’re like-minded. I probably had my Outback about 50% rebuilt by the time I semi-retired it to vacation life only up north. But I love using it on my visits and it’s a familiar, comfortable and useful old friend.
It might have to do with our age and experience, Paul. We’re relatively the same age…past the age of acquisition and comfortable with what we have. It certainly works for me….
Does Willie have any like-minded/vocation-ed friends back East? I could use someone like Willie around here.
And as Doug says, the lack of rust in your area is astounding. The fact that I need a torch to do nearly any suspension work is what keeps me from doing stuff that really otherwise ought to be done…because they are indeed broken.
I’m glad to see the XB back in action. I remember the chatter from when we visited 3 or 4 years ago. A clutch spring broke in my Vega at around 80-90K miles. It was somewhat drivable but pretty slippy. I sold it to a guy who planned to do a V8 swap with his teenage son, for $600. That’s 1980 dollars, which is about $2500 today. I had paid $1600 for it in 1976. Who says Vega resale value was poor?
The world could use more guys like Willie. When my father got too old to paint his house he hired a guy who was glad to work for $10 an hour cash. He was a professional painter but he took pity on older folks who needed help. The only thing was he’d work for a few hours when he could. This gave him beer money for what otherwise would have been unpaid downtime. Eventually the house got finished. Win, win.
Times two! Sometimes you just don’t want to do something, or you don’t have the skills, or you don’t have the time. Finding someone like Willie or the painter above is lucky!
I’m fortunate enough to have 2 excellent commercial service guys who handle residential on the side. AC and plumbing/electrical. If you don’t mind waiting for their next availability, they’re awesome. If it’s urgent and they can’t make it for a few days, they always send a qualified friend. Like I said, I’m fortunate…
I’m not quite as fortunate; my former officemate learned air conditioning while serving in the Navy and opened his own business but decided to go to school to learn about the field I’m in and got a job in my city while leaving another person to run his A/C business in another city. He would help us out but made it clear it wasn’t really his thing; he’d done it enough for years and his equipment wasn’t with him, so it was more out of favors because he really didn’t want to consume his free time working on A/C.
There was another engineer I worked with for 40 years who learned it as a hobby, he too had another career but took trouble to get his license to handle refrigerant. Nothing to do with it, but one time his refrigerator starter failed and he couldn’t get a replacement part for a couple days, he figured the starter was like an incandescent light so he rigged one up attached by alligator clips to where the starter had been. Besides the obvious safety concern (but he had no young kids so no one would mess with it) the light came on when it operated so was a bit distracting if you were trying to enjoy darkness in a nearby room.
The clutch in my watercooled VW is a bit different, especially the throwout bearing, but similar to Paul’s mine got fouled by leaking transaxle seal so I had to replace it. Interestingly, it was an A2 GTi which was infamous for the self-machining transaxle, though I was fortunate never to have that issue. My big problem was conceptual….I actually had talked myself into thinking it wasn’t working after replacement and must have removed/replaced it 3-4 times before convincing myself I’d actually gotten it right. Also put in synthetic tranaxle fluid (very stinky). Plus some of the time it was off the road I’d gotten ill so it took the better part of a month to get it back running. The GTi also was frequently cracking CV boot rubber such that every other year I’d have to remove the halfshaft and get it rebuilt. The funny thing is that I own an A4 Golf for 25 years (since new) and have yet to replace a single CV boot on it (nor anything but the cat converter on the stainless steel exhaust (GTi had aluminized). Same thing with voltage regulators which the GTi ate, but still original on the Golf. On the other hand the Golf has had issues that the GTi never had (good reason though, cable operated selector shaft on the A4 vs rods/joints on the A2, plus bad power steering rack on the Golf, which my GTI didn’t have. Plus lots of power window/lock issues on the Golf, the GTi had everything manual.
That second photo with the whole thing blown apart is a testament to Willie’s talents. I recently declined to repair a clutch on a car of mine because I did not want to get that deep in. But it was not as interesting or worthy as a XB however.
Congrats on getting your car overhauled for many more years of interesting travel.
“One can take a maxims a bit too far. One of mine is if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
Men, in general, do tend to take things too far. Maybe not only in their car but in their health. I stop by my machinist maybe once a month and I watch him deal with different cheap readers in his work. He also likes to read and paint and has even sold some paintings. Finally I said enough you need to come to my office, after work, and I’ll check your eyes no charge. Not only did he need visual help everywhere but he also was at the beginning of glaucoma. His last eye exam? Never at 64 and would have muddled on very slowly going blind in time. Well, at least a car can’t go blind.
At 175k, I finally needed to replace the original clutch on my Wrangler. I didn’t take pictures, but suffice to say I got my money’s worth out of the OEM unit. My Jeep gets similar use to your Scion – but such use is probably closer to the original design brief. Last weekend the wife and I drove down 22 miles into Grand Canyon and reached the Colorado River. Thinking about the original brakes, I was conscious of the fact that during the entire descent, I was using gears rather than the brakes to control the descent. I guess the long brake life is a function of the manual transmission – which leaves me still wondering just how long these original brakes might last. I’ve never had a vehicle go this long without needing a brake job.
20 year old me replaced the clutch in a 68 Mustang, But this job is 2 orders of magnitude from mine – both the far more complex car and the 45+ additional years on me. Thank goodness for guys like Willy!
I admire your commitment to the Xb. I wish that my climate permitted me that luxury.
Also, the old fashioned single stage white paint is something I don’t miss from my Honda Fit. I was contemplating a search for old-school DuPont No. 7 polish, but then the car went elsewhere. I had thought about a wrap, but wondered how it would look over bubbling rust.
That’s quite the job, Paul. Glad that you have such a good mechanic. Your xB will no doubt continue to give good service.
Thanks for the writeup Paul. Now if we could get you into another overland trip that would be icing on the cake. I recently had the clutch replaced on my 2014 Hyundai Elantra at 134k to the tune of almost $3k and that sucked big time. Although I found a guy that’s been in the car repair business for decades and owns his own shop.
It’s surprising how long you can keep a bad clutch going for, if you have any amount of mechanical sympathy. Just a case of being gentle on the throttle until clutch is fully engaged, not having a big differential in speed between engine and gearbox, and not getting yourself into positions that are going to kill the clutch (i.e., reversing up a steep slope).
I’d call a clutch broken when nobody else can drive the car but you. Been there, done that…
Willie seems a great guy to have on call for stuff like this. It certainly made sense to replace all those other wear items when the car was torn down this much already.
My third car was a 76 Celica GT 5-speed and we lived on a really steep hill on Coos Bay. The clutch started getting worse and worse, especially get up that hill. I took it to a guy I went to high school with and he replaced it for less than half of my dad’s mechanic. Showed my the flywheel and the spring had literally embedded in it; he’d never seen or heard of that happening.
Hello Paul,I enjoy this site immensely,almost daily for years.
I bought a Nissan Pulsar (sentra?) in 2000,a ’93 model with 276k Km on it.
Was told the clutch was slipping so I did the uphill test in 3rd gear
and confirmed this.14 years 150K Km (and a new cable)(and towing a
caravan around 5000Km) later it became a yard hack.
(using it to assist pulling tree branches etc down)
In 2025 it still drives with the slipping clutch…
Cheers Dave.
I worked as a truck mechanic for more than 30 years and would rather put a clutch in a 9500 GMC car carrier with an 8V71 Detroit, a/c, pony axle, and overhead rack than ANY sideways engine front wheel drive car!!! What ever you paid this guy wasn’t near enough!
That clutch wasn’t “broken”, it was _worn_out_ .
Good you have an honest and competent Mechanic on hand, I can’t find any here in So. Cal. and I’m getting too old and broken to keep doing this sort of works .
Now you understand those old guys in 1964 Who bought a well equipped A Body MoPar and loved it so…….
I too am at this stage of life, I don’t expect to ever buy another car, truck or Motocycle unless one gets wrecked .
What’s sticking out of the grille ? .
-Nate