So I spent pretty much the entire day pulling the transmission out yet again.  This time it was because of the slave cylinder hydraulics.  On the day after I wrapped up the 6-speed swap, I ran into a problem while backing out of my driveway where the clutch suddenly went rock hard and would not depress.  I tried to asses the situation on the side of the street and couldn’t see anything wrong so I pushed the car back into the garage and put it back up in the air.  After a little investigation I found that the fitting from the master cylinder was not completely seated into the slave.  I thought that perhaps I didn’t seat it all the way when originally connecting it.  So I pushed it back in, re-bled the clutch and then off I went.

Until a few days later when it happened again just trying to back out of the garage.  This time the fitting had been completely ejected from the slave quick connect.  I once again put it back in and made sure I heard the click signaling that it was where it was supposed to be.  For piece of mind I tossed a few tools and a small floor jack in the trunk then went off to my folks for dinner.  When leaving for the night I decided to take a cruise across the reservoir spillway and the long way home.  I was turning at a red light and as soon as I shifted out first I lost the clutch again.  This time it had been less than 20 miles total.  I managed to coast it into a mostly deserted parking lot where I pulled out the tools to try and fix it.  Dark lots, hot exhaust pipes and trying to work on your transmission at night don’t make for a very good combination.  I managed to get the fitting back in but not before burning my forearm a few times on the exhaust.  The clutch was a bit spongy since I wasn’t able to bleed the clutch again as I did not being any fluid with me.  I was able to limp it home however and there she was locked up yet again until I could get this sorted out.

I went looking around in some forums to see anyone else had seen this issue before and came up mostly empty.  I did connect with one guy however that had some trouble with the quick connect not staying on in the past and he simply replaced the fitting with an aftermarket setup.  The common factor in both cases however, was a quick connect fitting that used a metal clip to retain the male section of the fitting rather than the small metal fingers that OEM slaves used.  The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me that the clip was probably flexing under the additional pressure of my aftermarket master cylinder causing it to lose grip on the connection.  I found another guy on LS1Tech who had an OEM style quick connect that he didn’t need so I picked that up from him and thought I would give that a try instead of dropping more money on an OEM style slave.

Here is a side by side comparison of the two styles of quick connects.  On the left is the crappy one that came with a duralast slave from the local parts store, you can see how the metal clip would be a definite weak link to retaining the connection.  On the right is the OEM style of retaining fingers that will not allow the connection to separate without being depressed first.

So I spent a few hours pulling the exhaust and transmission to get to the slave so that I could spend all of 30 seconds replacing the quick connect fitting.  Then another few hours putting it all back together again.  But it’s done and I went cruising around in it some today making plenty of regular shifts and some hard ones to see if it was going to hold.  So far, so good.  I’m going to keep the tools in the trunk for a little longer however to to make sure.  Maybe after a few hundred miles without an incident I’ll feel good enough to leave them at home again.

And I still haven’t gotten around to buffing the repainted headlight door yet but the assembly was replaced and that’s all working good again as well.