Last night while driving home from a local HS football game, the clutch pedal on my '95 Rodeo started to get real spungy. Pedal travel kept getting shorter and was very hard to keep at pressure. Well, it's an old vehicle so probably a slave or master cylinder.
This morning I checked both and noticed a pronounced leak inside the footwell -- Clutch master cylinder is shot. Just to be sure I check the slave and notice that this thing is wedged so tight up between the exhaust, the frame and the transmission, that it will be a hassle to get at the bleeder.
The bleeder is sitting waaaaaay in back next to the transmission. It's located on top and towards the back of the slave cylinder -- not a lot of room for a wrench. Eventually I was able to get a 8mm line wrench in there and loosen the bleeder to attach a 3ft. rubber vacuum hose for draining the fluid.
First problem is easy -- remove the main line from the master cylinder! That works pretty well, because the reservoir itself is removable -- but the line fitting is stuck. Glad I bought those line crows feet, because it took a lot of torque to loosen that thing
What follows has to be one of the most screwed up ways to R&R a clutch master cylinder. My factory shop manual states that the entire pedal assembly be removed, along with a kick panel and an AC duct right below the assembly. There is absolutely no other way to do this -- I tried. This entire assembly needs to come out
The lift was a lifesaver because I could work with the car chest high; which made access to the footwell a lot easier -- after an hour the pedal assembly is out. However, without a complete set of 1/4" drive sockets, swivel sockets, universal joints, and long extensions, this would have been impossible :BangHead:
What a pain!!! Mounting the new master is no problem at this point -- it went in like "buddah".
However it took another two hours to fit the pedal, pedal stop, AC duct work, kick panel, and to make travel adjustments.
I bled the thing with a hand held Mighty Vac pump and it worked real well -- nice little pumps. The pump was attached to the 3ft. vacuum hose that I had installed on the slave cylinder bleeder. All-in-all, it was a royal PITA --
Here are a few pics of the car to show how open the car is on a mid-rise lift from the front and the rear. Glad I bought that darn lift last February :headbang:
BTW -- the lift can go higher (up to 57", but with the Isuzu my ceiling height won't allow it --
