Changed clutch for the first and hopefully last time
Our fine Civic had a catastrophic clutch failure that rendered the car undriveable. A shop quoted me $700 to replace it. I'm a cheapskate. With the factory service manual I decided to tackle it myself. Well, not myself, since I had a buddy who's not afraid to turn wrenches himself (he has a LS2-powered Miata) helping. He also has a lift in his garage.
Neither of us had done a clutch on a FWD car before, so we were both learning on the job. Just looking at the instructions and seeing that we needed to drop the front subframe certainly indicated that this was foreign territory. But we dove in and, despite a few nuts and bolts fighting to stay attached, got everything apart after five or six hours of work. We returned to the project fresh the next day and got it all put back together in five hours. The car stated on the first try, no leaks, no funny noises, and it drives great.
I'm pretty glad we tackled this ourselves rather than pay a shop to do it. I don't know if I would like to do a similar job again anytime soon (this car makes Miatas seem Model T simple) but at least I know it's not impossible to DIY.
Looking forward to more happy motoring out of our box-stock '02 which is now showing somewhere around 119K miles.
