Repair Log: 276,000-ish

Way back in August, 2009 my second clutch failed me on the streets of Temecula. I was just over 214K miles. Crevier to the rescue, blah blah blah.

Fast forward to, oh, I don’t know, last week. When down shifting, Roxy starting making this really nasty shudder. It started getting worse this week, so naturally, I ask Jerry at Eurotechs if he can take a look. Everything was checking out until he got her up on the lift, which is when we discovered the lower motor mount was shot. Hoping that was the cause of the dreaded shudder, a new part was procured and replacement scheduled for today.

Part installed, Jerry takes her around the block, but the shudder is still there, no matter what he tried. It’s determined that the issue was the clutch and he gets Roxy back on his schedule as soon as he gets the parts. Everything is ok until I go to drive home. After forcing her into first, she started rolling forward with the clutch fully depressed. Reverse behaved the same way, but in, um, reverse.

So, yep. Bad clutch. Lucky for me, I actually "broke down" at my mechanics shop. But it put me in a bit of a jam, transportation wise. So Jerry, being the kind of guy that he is, tossed me the keys to his MINI for the weekend until Roxy gets fixed up! Awesome!

I completely blame Phoenix for this outage. There really is no such thing as "highway driving" in Phoenix. If you are on the highway, it’s on a road full of people that just love to stop, then go, then stop, then go. If you aren’t on the highway, then you are on city streets. Streets with signals that aren’t timed, so you catch them all red. Not only does ADOT not know how to spell algorithm, they also have no idea what it means. For the record, Phoenix is also the only other city in which I will not give you a hard time for owning a auto transmission. I’ve actually encouraged it to a few people. I mean, come on, it killed my clutch in 65k -ish miles.

I’ll be sure to report back when Roxy gets home.