Hydraulic Clutch Help Needed

[Jon]

Can anyone please give me some advice about the hydraulic clutch on my i.e turbo.
There is a big amount of play on the pedal, when I first got the car I had to pump the pedal just to get the clucth working.
Not knowing anything about this kind of clucth system any help about getting this working right would be great.
Thank you in advance.

[Mike Schieber]

It sounds that you definitely have air in the system. You will need to top off the clutch resevoir with brake fluid, and bleed the air out through the slave cylinder. You may need to replace or rebuild the master and slave cylinders, because they are probably leaking, and drained the resevoir, allowing air in the system. Here are some links on how to bleed the air. Sometimes these systems can be a real pain to get the air out, and people end having to pressure bleed them. Good Luck.

http://www.svmgcc.org/hydraulic.htm
http://www.v8archie.com/arch4.htm
http://www.mtco.com/~westcj/Brian/clbleed.htm
http://www.monmouth.com/~rothe/clutch_bleeding.html

[Mark]

It also sounds like you may have a problem with the clutch master cylinder, they are fairly inexpensive, try betacar or similar company's. I had a similar prob with m series 2 turbo, then the seals blew leaking fluid into the footwell! not good. The clutch master cylinder is mounted on the engine side of the bulkhead, behind the pedals, not difficult to change, but tricky to get to the 2 nuts holding it in place. Hope this is some further help, good luck!