The countdown to Rogue Concept 2019 begins

Things have been pretty quiet on the Skyline front recently.

Mostly because I’ve been busy keeping our dailies on the road (as you may have seen in my Land Rover posts.)

However, with Rogue Concept 2019 looming it was high time I started digging into that long list of tasks to make sure I have a running working drift car for the event. First thing on the list was the clutch. A couple years ago I fitted a stage 2 Competition clutch kit and a stock (brand new) RB25 flywheel. For the few drift events I’ve attended it had felt fine. However, while sitting on the driveway since my last drift day in November the clutch had stopped working.

I tried moving the car around on the driveway a few times and when I had the clutch pedal pressed the car wouldn’t come out of gear and in one case the car decided it wanted to keep moving even with the pedal fully pressed. So this was the first thing to look at.

I started by getting the car up on stands and then cracking off the bleed nipple on the slave cylinder, low and behold nothing came out! There was definitely fluid in the reservoir, so what was stopping it?

It’s strange to me that a car can sit untouched for a couple of months and you suddenly have air in the system, so there must be a blockage or something, I started removing the clutch lines moving from the slave cylinder back up to the master, and then just as I unfastened the last piece of hard line to the reservoir I hit fluid!

For a while now I had been thinking about simplifying the clutch lines and removing the damper so I had already bought a new line from GKTech so I fitted it in place of the mass of metal (although admittedly not as much metal as I was expecting!) Then started to bleed the line.

This was a straight forward process, first fill the reservoir on the master cylinder, then crack the bleed nipple on the master until you see fluid come out (at this point I had drained all the old fluid to make way for fresh). Next top up the reservoir and head under the car and crack off the nipple on the slave cylinder, and leave it open until you start to see clutch fluid dripping out it should only take a few seconds before you start seeing drip (gravity is a big help here!) Finally, get someone to sit in the car pumping the cutch pedal and occasionally holding it while you lay under the car cracking the bleed nipple to remove any remaining air in the system. Repeat this a few times checking the feel of the pedal regularly.

cylinder, then crack the bleed nipple on the master until you see fluid come out (at this point I had drained all the old fluid to make way for fresh). Next top up the reservoir and head under the car and crack off the nipple on the slave cylinder, and leave it open until you start to see clutch fluid dripping out it should only take a few seconds before you start seeing drip (gravity is a big help here!) Finally, get someone to sit in the car pumping the cutch pedal and occasionally holding it while you lay under the car cracking the bleed nipple to remove any remaining air in the system. Repeat this a few times checking the feel of the pedal regularly.

Hey presto! I now have a working clutch again!