- This clutch makes no sense to me. So I'm gonna install it in my car. (thunder)
(trap beat) A long time ago I actually got a handful of parts for free for the Miata. And one of the things
I got was this clutch. And the first time I saw it I was like "Damn, it's a three puck design, "it's a copper ceramic clutch material, "and it's got this heavy
duty pressure plate?" It's got the makings of being
a high-performance clutch with a lot of torque holding capability. But then I looked it up online and found that the torque
rating's only 189 foot pounds and that just doesn't
make any sense to me. Why make a clutch with all
these aggressive properties that can only hold 189 foot pounds? So what gives? Is this performance
clutch just a total phony, or am I missing something and somehow this just
really nails some sweet spot of drivability and performance? I don't know yet but today
we're gonna find out. And along the way we're gonna talk about what makes me think
this thing is so weird, how clutches work in general, and then we'll drive it
around to see if this thing really is as weird as I think it might be. When you make these changes and make such an aggressive clutch you ultimately compromise
some drivability. There are other clutches
on the market for the Miata that hold over 300 foot pounds with a much more comfort oriented design. When you run a pucked clutch with an aggressive friction material you lose a lot of drivability. This thing is gonna engage
like a bat out of hell. It's gonna be like an
on/off switch, I think. So before we go any further, let's go drive the Miata how it is now so we can compare drivability before and after we install
this wild little thing. (engine idling) We'll see. Start letting the clutch out. So it starts to engage right about there. Oh, it's so smooth. You could just do that all day. You can do it without
thinking about it at all. It's so easy to drive right now. My biggest concern is that we're gonna ruin
the drivability of this car. The engagement window is
gonna become very short. It's gonna basically go
from fully disengaged to full engaged very quickly. - [Eddie] I think it's
gonna feel like (bleep). - I think it's gonna feel worse. I hope it doesn't feel
like absolute ass(bleep) but it sure might. - I think it'll maybe, it'll be a little bit shorter window but it's not gonna be as bad
as you guys are saying it is. That's my prediction. What do you think it's gonna be? - [Eddie] I think it's gonna be awful. I think it's gonna be
like an on/off switch. - All right, well we'll see who's right. (chill beat) - Okay, we got the car all
nice and safely jacked up. To get to the clutch, obviously we need to get
the transmission out. So to get the transmission out there's some stuff we need
to get out of the way first. We need to get the exhaust off. Okay, exhaust it out of the way. Look at how fresh that trans fluid is. It's like we only, it's like we only put that stuff in there a month and a half ago. Okay, so we got the
drive shaft disconnected, just four bolts here at the rear, and then we should be able to pop it off and it'll just pull right
on out of the transmission. Nice and easy. Just like that. Now if we hadn't drained
the transmission already we'd be leaking some fluid right now. I need this thing to swing out of the way so I can drop the transmission. It's called the power plant frame and it ties the transmission back here to the diff or to the rear subframe. All right, sweet. Now I'm taking off the slave cylinder and then it's time to pop
out these bell housing bolts and take the transmission out. All right, we've been over
this before but listen. It's no good to rely on your
brain to remember stuff. Trust me. So rather than trying to remember where bolts came out of
or where they go back, juts make yourself a little diagram. This is our bell housing and these are all the bolt positions, and this is where they came
from and the, you know, the way they came out, front or back. So makes it a lot easier
to put things back in. All right, so there's a
couple electrical connectors on top of the transmission. Now that we've got it about half way down we can get our hands up to get to them. Okay, that should be all
the electrical stuff. (chill beat) It's too tall on the transmission jack to make it out from under the car. So I'm just gonna pull it back and then I'm gonna drag it off the jack and drag it out form under here. She's out and it only took eight minutes. So we finally got the transmission out. Now we just need to take off
the old clutch and flywheel. Now when you go to do that, you put your wrench on, the thing spins 'cause it's just connected
to your crankshaft. So the trick is to reinstall
one of your bell housing bolts, then get a pry bar. You can hold against the
flywheel to turn your bolt loose. But you could also just buy impact tools. (drill revving) (bangs)
Ow! Ow! Pressure plate for you. Clutch disk for you. Now we got to get this flywheel off. All right, so this is the stock flywheel. That means that this puppy weighs a lot. So another little trick, I just put another bell housing bolt into the other bottom hole so that I don't really have to worry about catching the flywheel when it comes off. All I got to do is just make
sure it doesn't tip forward. (drill revs) Okay, flywheel (groans). All right, so we've got
the flywheel off now and we can see the back of our engine. This is the back of our crankshaft where the flywheel mounts up. And surrounding that, this seal, which always tends to leak, is called your rear main seal. And if you're ever doing a clutch job you should also do your rear main seal, 'cause you're already in
there, it's right here. I like to use just a variety of picks. You can also use flathead screwdrivers, but what's important is that you don't scratch either surface on either side of the seal. There she is. If you had to get in here
just to do a rear main seal, boy, that would be annoying. All right, so we've got our
old clutch out of the car and it looks pretty good. It's got a lot of life left. Like I said, we didn't really need to
do a clutch in this car so this thing would be good
for a long time to come. But let's go inside and
compare this thing side by side to our new fancy clutch. So after looking at these things you can tell pretty quickly
that they look a lot different. This is that organic full-face disk that's great for
comfortable street driving, and this is our nasty,
crazy, three puck clutch. So this aggressive material
gets clamped really hard because it's only being
clamped in three little spots. So this is the stock flywheel and she's a thick Betty. This new one, ooh, it's nice and light. But why do you even want
a lightweight flywheel? Well, your flywheel is
bolted to the crankshaft on your engine. It's spinning anytime
your engine is running. So that gives your engine momentum because this thing is heavy. So when you've got a heavy flywheel it's hard to stop your engine, it's a lot harder to stall. But it also takes a while for your revs to climb
up and to fall back down. So the lighter flywheel, those revs can move a lot quicker but it's also a lot easier
to stall off the line 'cause you have less momentum
keeping the engine running. Then we've also got our pressure plates, and, I mean, they look
pretty freakin' identical except that this one just looks old. Although I do believe that this has an increased
clamping capacity or clamping capability over the stock one. All right, so now that we've
torn out all this stuff to get our transmission out
to get down to our clutch, we've got it out and we've
looked at it side by side with our new crazy one, my opinion is still the same. I think this thing is still gonna drive considerably worse with this clutch. Yep, my opinion has not changed. Let's get cracking, boys. The flywheel and the pressure plate will have a light film of
oil on them for shipping so that they don't rust. But that would be very bad if you installed them
with that oil on there. It would completely ruin
the friction disk basically. So got to make sure you wipe it down. One of the things we need
to do on the transmission is replace our release bearing
or our throwout bearing. So do that we're gonna
pop off our clutch fork, which is just a little spring back here. Okay, this is about as good as you've ever gonna be able
to see what's going on in here. When you push the clutch petal, that pushes on this fork, which pushes the release bearing forward, which pushes on our diaphragm spring, which releases all the
pressure on our pressure plate, which releases the friction disk, and the flywheel, just kind of undoes that sandwich. All right, so let's
clean this thing up now and put it back together. Much cleaner. And I'm much wetter. And I'm also gonna put on
a nice new coat of grease. Not just any old grease, some nice high-temp moly grease that should stay in place for a long time. You also need to grease up these splines but very lightly because
that puppy is spinning. And if you put a bunch of grease on that and then that grease slings
out onto your clutch disk, (weird noise) you just killed your clutch. Okay, so we're down here. I've got all my flywheel hardware. Just reusing the stock stuffs. And now I'm gonna apply
my new threadlocker. All right, on the Miata there's no way to put this thing on wrong, but on some cars there so
you got to pay attention. Okay, now it's time to torque I think. (clinking) The last thing we need to
do is wipe it down again 'cause I just made a huge mess of it. You can see the hub sticks out a little further on this side. That goes towards the gearbox. So we'll put it up in here, get our pressure plate in place. Should get it to slide on. Okay, so this is our clutch alignment tool and pretty much every clutch you ever get is gonna come with one of these. And the point of it is to make sure that your
clutch disk is centered, 'cause it's kind of floating right now. We could tighten this pressure plate up and have the clutch
disk be way off center, and then it's gonna be impossible to get our transmission back in. So this basically simulates
the transmission being in place and the front of this slips
right into the pilot bushing. (groovy music) Now let's put that transmission back in. Uh, yeah, how are we gonna do this? The whole trans jack not
fitting under here thing was pretty annoying. - [Eddie] Put it on your belly. - I know but it's, I don't really want to is the thing. (groaning) Ow, (bleep). (groaning) This power plant frame is (bleep)
in the way of my left knee and my right knee can't
hold up a transmission. Come on, leg. Okay, come on, honey. Ooh, losing it, ah (bleep). (sighs) Ah (bleep), why me? Ooh, boy. (clanking) (groaning) All right, so we're jamming
the shifter back in real quick so we can try to put it in gear. (clanking) Tight. And then we'll be able
to put the driveshaft in the output of the transmission and spin it so that we
spin the input shaft so we change how the splines meet up between the clutch and the transmission. All right, so right now the
splines aren't meeting up. So we'll spin one of them and hopefully they'll find each other. (groans) (bleep). (squeaking)
(groans) Just -- wiggle it. There we go, there we go, there we go. - It's in?
- Yep. - Then I bust this puppy back out, that goddamn masterpiece. My old used cardboards will be
for sale on shop.donut.media for only $100 apiece. (chill trap beat) Okay, that's good enough for now. That'll hold the back
of the transmission up. Now we can go ahead and put all our bell
housing bolts back in, cinch the transmission
back down to the engine, and then probably go to sleep. I'm gonna cry deep, deep tears. Okay, so that about does it for tonight. We got the old stuff out, new stuff back in, but it's dark, it's late, I'm tired. So I'll get up nice and
early in the morning, button this thing up, and then we'll go drive it and see if we just ruin
the way this car drives. And if we did, god, I really looking for forward to putting that old stock clutch back in. (chill music) All right, so we got back at
it nice and early this morning. Eddie just got here but I got
a lot of stuff done already. So reinstalling all this stuff is pretty much exactly
the same as taking it off, just in reverse. So the driveshaft's back in, the exhaust is back on, all the bell house bolts
are tight and torqued. All right, so we got our shifter out of the transmission in the old Miata. And where it goes in, this is called the turret. It usually is pretty empty
like it is right now, but -- my turkey baster
in, some fresh fluid. Get things shifting real nice. Alrighty, it's time to fill
the transmission back up with some gear oil. We've done this before, I've showed you how to do it, but it's real easy. We're just gonna pump
fluid up into our fill plug until it spills out and that's how we know it's full. Okay, there she goes dripping out. All right, so I just
wanted to take a break from the madness for a minute and give you guys some honest advice on what you should do if you're looking for a
clutch for yourselves. 'Cause obviously what we got
going on is a little weird. So if you're shopping for a clutch, you should first be honest with yourself about how much power you're making or how much power you intend to make on whatever you're putting a clutch in. Then once you know how much
power that is in terms of torque then you can select a clutch
that hold that much torque. And basically what you want to do is get a clutch that'll hold
the torque you're gonna make without being too far overkill. Like in the Miata, if we had put a clutch that
could hold 500 foot pounds, we'd be dealing with a
whole bunch of drawbacks from that aggressive clutch design that we don't really need. So there's no reason to go
too overkill on a clutch. Just get what can hold
the power you're making and do it as comfortably as possible. So bleeding your slave
cylinder on your clutch is pretty much just like
bleeding your brakes. So I'm sucking out what I can, and then we'll fill it
back up with fresh fluid. And then I'll do down below and I'm gonna crack the bleeder open and I'm gonna let gravity do its thing and just let some fluid
flow through for a minute. Then we'll tighten it up and then I'll have my boy
Eddie get in the driver's seat and pump the clutch the up, and then I'll tell him to hold it. And then when he's holding it
I'll crack the bleeder open, some air and fluid should shoot out. Do that a couple times and then the clutch will be bled, baby. All right, so we've still
got the car on the stands. I'm gonna start it up real
quick and put it in gear just to make sure we're not
hearing any funny noises, make sure everything seems like it's fine. Okay, so the flywheel's spinning. Are my wheels spinning? - [Eddie] No. - Okay, so that means the
clutch is not just dragging or anything like that. That's good. So now I'll put it in first and just slowly let the clutch out. First time it ever engages. There she goes, wheels
are spinning I presume. No weird noises, no weird
shudders, vibrations, or shakes. We got a new clutch. Now I can't tell what it's
gonna feel like from up here because we're not on the ground. The tires aren't loaded up so it's not like we're actually
pushing the car forward. So still not sure what the engagement's
actually gonna feel like, but we'll find out soon. Yeah, all right, with that the interior's finished and I'm pretty sure the
exterior's good to go. Then time to put this thing
on the ground and go drive, see what this thing feels like finally. All right, let's see how this thing feels. (engine starts) Okay, so just trying to take
off as smoothly as possible. You can definitely tell
that it's a much more aggressively engaging clutch, and the engagement
window is a lot smaller. It goes from being completely disengaged, you feel it start to engage, and then it's engaged. But it's not that bad. It's pretty dang drivable really. I mean, I don't know, I was a little bit
concerned going into this that we were actually gonna really wreck the way this thing drove as far as being easy to just hop in and go for a cruise and not feeling like
it's a chore to drive. And listen, the clutch petal is a little bit heavier, the engagement is a little bit
harsher and more aggressive, and the engagement window
is a little bit shorter. But it's not that bad and we've got more torque
holding capability out of it. And honestly 190 foot pounds, even if that is an accurate rating, that's probably all the
torque I'm gonna make on at least the first iteration of a turbo build on this car really. And then, you know what, it can probably hold 200 foot pounds if it can hold 190, right? I don't know but we're
gonna find out some day. All right, let's go back to the house. You know what, I'm in a
good mood now, I'm happy. We didn't ruin the car, the clutch is on, the hard work is done. Now we're just left to reap the benefits and that's what this is all about. All right, so we got our little
three puck clutch installed and the truth is it's not that bad. It's not overly aggressive, it's very drivable, and it does give the car
kind of a sporty feel. So you know what, I think today was a win. I am a little concerned that
it only holds 189 foot pounds but we'll put that to the test once we strap a turbo onto this thing, which is hopefully gonna
happen sooner than later. So what else did we learn today? Well, we learned that
you can struggle your way through a clutch in the driveway. It's gonna be difficult, don't kid yourself into
thinking that it's not, but it's doable. You will struggle. You saw it, you saw me
ride that struggle bus, but hey, it's all worth it in the end and we do it for you guys anyway. And if this is your first car video or your thousandth it doesn't matter, You're welcome here. We do this every single day, new car content everyday. And something funny usually happens and we try to be informative. So I hope you guys are learning something watching me struggle. So if a video everyday
isn't enough for you, you got to check out our subreddit, check out our Facebook group. We're a whole dang community. So hit that Subscribe button and join us. We'll see you guys here tomorrow. I'm Zack and this is "Money Pit". Roll that title.
(laughter)
