2000 Insight 5 speed repair & build thread

[California98Civic]

It is hard to tell in such low res photos, but that honeycomb looks a lot like my CAT did after I acid-washed it. But some of it might be a little blocked-up. Still, it is quite clean: no dark spots, no melting, and seemingly little or none of the white chalky residue that coated and covered mine before cleaning. Looks good enough for Cali SMOG!

[Daox]

I started a new thread for the transmission heating modification here:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...ant-35269.html

[Daox]

Woo, blast from the past. I started tooling with the Insight fixes again tonight. Nothing major as I didn't have much time, but I pulled the clutch apart to see if it would need to be replaced or not. The disc seems to have enough meat on it yet for a while. However, the pressure plate and flywheel have been abused enough to make the clutch juttery, and you can visibly see the overheating that has happened.

My question for you guys is... how would you recommend resurfacing it? I'm thinking I take some 400 - 1000 grit to it and call it a day. I've heard of others doing that to their cars. I've never really heard of how its gone after the fact though. Have any of done it?

Here are some pics:

[Baltothewolf]

Take em to a machine shop and pay 50 bucks to get it resurfaced. I hate clutch shudder, so to me personally it's not worth the risk, due to the work involved in pulling the trans to DIY resurfacing.

[MetroMPG]

Nice to see an update!

Sorry I can't offer any help though. I've never had to do clutch work myself.

[nemo]

Looking at the disc, have you been able to determine were the damage (spring and mount area) came from. If you are keeping the car long term just do it all. I'd hate to pull it apart again.

[gone-ot]

Clutch "shudder" is caused by the same problem that causes disc-brake "shudder" roughness between the surface (flywheel or rotor) and the gripping material (clutch or disc pad).

[Daox]

I did some more reading online and found people saying that they've used 36 grit sandpaper, 180 grit sandpaper and even just emery cloth / scotchbrite on them if the surface isn't too bad (and mine isn't bad at all). I think I'll give the scotchbrite a shot. It won't remove enough metal material to make a difference.

The reason I'm asking is a new clutch kit is about $250 and a new flywheel is another $100. So, since the disc is good I'll reuse it. I'm not sure there are many places locally that even turn parts anymore, but I'll call around too just to see what my options are.

[Baltothewolf]

Napa has machine shops. The one by my house does at least. It's 50$ to resurface a flywheel.

[Daox]

Well, I decided to roll the dice. I resurfaced the flywheel and pressure plate by hand tonight with 80 grit sandpaper. We'll see how it turns out!

The tool and the finished pressure plate:





Here is the finished surface. As you can see, I didn't dig into the metal much at all. The main purpose was mainly to remove any clutch material from the surface.





Flywheel before:







Flywheel after: