Thread: Absolutely stumped by clutch

If you can draw fluid/air from the slave cylinder with the pipe disconnected from the slave cylinder then reconnect the pipe and disconnect it from the master cylinder to try that, thereby eliminating each component in turn.

Originally Posted by dan_is_vayne

Afternoon all,
I've been an avid reader of a lot of these threads whilst fixing this and that on my disco but finally I can go no further and come for aid.

It has been hard to to put the car into 1st or 2nd for the last week, slowly getting worse as the days go by. The clutch pedal will only return to about half way. Once it seemed to have "warmed up" the problem went away, and i wouldn't really get it when returning from work.

So these being the symptons reading up about said symptoms and asking colleagues, it seemed I had a few possible fixes; bleed the system, check slave and master cylinders.
Well all the trouble started once i tried to bleed the slave, I had hardly any oil come out, certainly not enough to check for air. So then after much reading, again, I went and bought a hand pump siphoning kit. It had all the attachments to pull the oil through. But whilst doing this I found that the pipe coming from the slave to the pump just sucked into itself, making me think there is a blockage somewhere.
So off came the master and slave cylinders, inspected nothing too bad, not perfect but definitely not the worst I've seen though blogs and videos.

So my question is, finally, what more can I do to find this blockage? I've not seen any talk about the pipes between master and slave, could this be a problem? Obviously I'd like to get this fixed before work Tuesday, but I don't really see it happening now.

Thanks for reading my first post, I hope I made some sense with what I've tried to explain.

Dan

Hi Dan
Probably the same as my old rangie, they are an absolute pig to bleed! You need to get the nose of he car pointing up as high as you can. That said, hydraulics don't just need bleeding, there must be an underlying cause. If you can swap them out for new ones great, if not get kits and rebuild them. Do them both and obviously use new fluid. My money is on it being a rubber issue rather than a blockage. Then again I have been wrong before!

The flexible hoses can swell inside which would fit the symptom.

Try reverse bleeding with a syringe, pushing the fluid from the slave up through to the reservoir, was the ONLY way i could bleed mine, trying to do it the normal way for hours on end with no result was very frustrating to say the least & if there is a blockage it might push it back up to the reservoir

Cheers for the help guys, I'll give the reverse bleed a go. I've just bought new slave and master so I'm thinking give it another good going over to see what's blocked where, hopefully something will turn up/pop out then I can install new cylinders and away I go! 😁
I'll keep you updated