Cold clutch chatter

02 GT, 23,000 miles. This stupid thing has had a BAD clutch chatter in the mornings off and on for about a year. If you drive a lot, > 60 miles, then it won't do it the next day, other wise it will do it the first 5 or 10 miles of the day. This morning it about threw my hand off the dang shifter as I was moderately on it to get into traffic.

Had the Ford guy look at it when getting the 3650 TSB a few months ago, he said the clutch looked perfect. It didn't chatter with his test drive, as it is a long drive to get it to that dealer.

I thought it might be a small oil leak that shows up after it sits overnight, but why doesn't it do it when you put a lot of miles on it the previous day.

Ideas, anybody, please!!!!!

Oops, yeah, it's stock.

Ghostface said:

I think I might have this also, can you describe what it sounds like?

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Well it's not so much a sound as it is a feel. It feels like it's gonna shake the dash off when you let out the clutch to get moving. You can feel it in the clutch pedal and the shifter. This is a VERY bad case. Sometimes you can get a little chatter and not be anything wrong. This is BAD. The shifter moves left and right about an inch when taking off.

You can minimize it by barely slipping it then dumping it at close to an idle, but that's a little tricky as the RPM's go down to about 300 before it gets enough momentum to get rolling, it's not too hard to kill it when you're doing that.

At light throttle leaving it's just plain annoying. At anything past part throttle leaving and it's tearing the heck out of everything. I've tried everything, slipping it more, less, side stepping the clutch with it out of gear, slipping it to try to clean off the surfaces, nothing works.

It won't do it at all after about 10 miles or after a lot of miles the previous day. The Ford guy tried easing out on the clutch and taking off in 2nd and 3rd at idle, that should make it chatter if it was going too.

I don't know, I'm starting to get a little hacked off at it.

Mustang5L5 said:

That's odd.

I have the same milage on my '03 and only get clutch chatter if i drive around a lot on a really hot day. Even then i really have to bog the motor down to get chatter.

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That's what doesn't make sense, even on really hot days, after about 10 or 15 miles it's good, and doesn't get any worse no matter how long or hard you drive it. Also, it's not near as bad if it bogs, kinda backwards to what I know as clutch chatter from other cars.

Also, I'm really easy on this thing, most of the time anyway. The motor doesn't move like the mounts are bad on it, and he should have seen the tranny mounts when he had it apart.