Clutch Pedal Vibration Please Help

02MustangGT46

New Member
May 30, 2015
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Hey guys, ive been having a complete and udder nightmare with my car. 02 GT. At first I was feeling some unsmoothness *grainy* feelings in the pedal that would come and go. I figured i would replace the clutch as it has 90k miles and everything is stock.

So, i bought an exedy mach 400 clutch kit and a ford racing throwoout bearing and pilot bearing and threw it on. Also, resurfaced my flywheel. Drove it, the unsmoothness feeling was gone, but in return i had a very noticeable vibration in the slack of the pedal. past the slack point it stopped vibration and was completely smooth.

I thought no big deal its just an adjusting problem so i ordered a Maximum Motorsports Adjuster Kit. Put that on and adjusted it to where the tob would start to spin, and then a couple more turns. Pedal felt better, but still vibration. The only way i could get the vibration to stop was it tighten the adjuster up until there was absolutely no slack in the pedal, but of course that would wear my clutch out if i drove like that.

So i thought maybe it just needed broken in for some reason. So i drove it for a couple weeks off and on for 350 miles, babying it, never revved above 3k RPM.

As the clutch started to break in I started to rev it a little higher in my shifts. With these higher rpm shifts, the fork would always fall off the set point on the pivot ball. I would have to go under the car and manually push it up into position and hear a click as it slid into place on the pivot ball. When the fork would fall from the set position, the pedal would get extrememly hard to push, and would have a "click" sound past a certain point in the pedal and also start vibrating ALOT more violently . But once i pushed the fork back into place, vibration would still be there but was minor, but was only a matter of time before it fell off again. I tried messing with the adjuster thinking it may not have enough pressure on the fork causing it to slide off but with no luck.

So, I ordered a OEM fork, Pivot ball, And a brand new OEM throwout bearing from my local ford dealership. I stayed up until 4:30 am and put all those in, along with brand new OEM flywheel bolts and pressure plate bolts. Got it all put together again and SAME :poo:.

I am totally beat on whats going on. I have had this transmission out so many times chasing these problems with no luck whatsoever. I am beyond the point of frustration. What do i do???
 
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Yea, I went down this road with my 2000 last year. The first clutch I put in and I had the vibrating clutch pedal. We are not the first people to deal with this. Eventually the TOB will anialate itself and you will be back in. I'm still not 100% sure what made mine do it but the second time I installed a UPR firewall adjuster and triple hook quadrant and it was fine after that. Best advise I can give u is make sure the clutch pressure plate bolts are clean and tourqed down to the proper specs in the proper order. Same goes for the flywheel.
 
I have re installed the flywheel and pressure plate about 3 times and every time i have torqued up the torque scale in a star pattern. So, i torqued the flywheel at 59 ftlbs, started at 15, then 25, then 35, 45, and finally 59. all in a star pattern. same goes for the pressure plate but that is torqued at 24. so i just did 10 then 24 there.Im honestly considering throwing my stock clutch and pressure plate back in..
 
A buddy of mine pointed me in the direction of the flywheel and i think hes on to it. He's thinking the flywheel has been improperly machined. Having a wave in it I'm thinking is causing the pressure plate fingers to be non uniform which explains why I'm getting the vibration in the first couple inches of the clutch. This also explains why some people on here that have the same problem say it gets better over time. Guessing the flywheel smooths out and the vibration gets better. I'm also still getting friction noise when the clutch engages. Coming up on 400 miles you'd think it would be silent or ateast getting better by now. This also makes me think the flywheel has a rough textured surface or is not smooth alltogether too. It has GOT to be either the flywheel or the pressure plate fingers bent from the factory. I'm leaning more toward the flywheel personally.
 
Well, after installing a new clutch and pressure plate from exedy, vibration is gone for the most part. There is still some, which is really annoying. the fingers on the new pressure plate when installed were still not 100% perfectly smooth like the oem pressure plate was... guess its something i just have to deal with. Wondering if Exedy had some bad batches of pressure plates....