Please help, I have been working the same problem for three weeks now. I have gravity bleed it, vacuum bled it (attached to the slave cylinder), pumped the pedal, not pumped the pedal, jacked up the rear end, the front end......and still I have a real soft pedal. None of the local garages will even take it and bleed it for me. I have installed all brand new compnents from the resevoir to the slave cylinder. The only thing I can think of is there is air in the Master cylinder and air in the line from the master to the slave. Any thoughts?

 

ford does not resurface flywheels? this is not true. i worked at ford and we always turned them unless they were severly cracked. we just installed a clutch in a ranger at my shop last month. the only way we found to remove all air was by bench bleeding the unit. if you remove clutch master and line as a unit. hold it (master) in a vice with the line pionted up.have someone hold the resivour above it and then push the rod into master. while holding pressure on the rod push the pin in the end of the line to release the fluid. it take roughly 2-3 times for this to work. in the end u should not have any more than .160 thousand free play in rod. this is a tsb for this from ford. worked for us the first time.

 

Silverbeard, did you figure out why you couldn't change gears yet? I just put a clutch and tranny in my 95. The tranny shifted fine on the bench but, when I installed everything and put my shifter on I found out I couldn't change the gears. I still have a really soft pedal so I am going through the pain everyone else seems to be having. Even if the clutch slave wasn't properly bled the shifter should still shift right? If not maybe I bound the splines up while installing it. Anyone have any thoughts or suggestion? Thanks...

 

I used the long, but tried and true method, of opening the bleeder and continually filling the resevoir. It took two hours, but it did work.

 

Try putting a pedal jack on it overnight. In other words hold the pedal down and don't open the bleeder, the air should work it's way to the high point and on release of the pedal it should vent out. A board cut so it is the right length between the pedal and the lower part of the seat should work to hold it down.

 

Here is the easiest and cheapest way I have found to bleed the clutch. I just fought with mine for 3 days doing all the dozen different gravity bleed methods i have heard about including the standard brake line type of bleed.

I went to wal-mart and bought a 1.5" diam. syringe used for mixing 2-cycle gas and oil, then I dug out some approx. 1/8" fuel line I had sitting around. I filled the syringe full of brake fluid and held the entire thing upside down to squirt the remaining air out (like the doctors do for shots). If the cap and diaphragm is off, with the clutch pedal up, the system is completely open, simply attach the fuel line to the open bleeder valve and squirt the syringe full of fluid into the system. A full syringe was enough to fill the system comletely with fluid pushing air and excess fluid out of the reservoir. This technique is really quick and easy which I wound up doing multiple times as I tried to troubleshoot. It bled the system about 90-95%, to the point where my clutch worked but it engaged just barely off the floor of the cab.

In order to bleed it the rest of the way I got a one man bleeder system from discount. Its a little bottle with a magnet and some clear tubing. Close the system by replacing the cap and diaphragm and then pump the clutch pedal 30 times. (Don't know why to do this but this part of the bleeding process I found in a chilton manual). After you have pumped the clutch, attach the bottle to the open bleeder valve. Pump the clutch until you don't see anymore bubbles in the fluid.

I found that like most of you this system doesn't gravity bleed with any significant amount of air trapped in it. The syringe fixes that problem so that 95% of the air is out. At that point you can gravity bleed it by removing the cap and dia. and opening the bleeder valve, just keep refilling the resovoir. But I'm not sure how much brake fluid you would waste or use. One guy had mentioned 2 hours. The bottle method above takes around 200 pumps of the clutch or so and is really easy if you con someone else into pumping the clutch while you sit underneath the truck counting bubbles.

On a side note I know this is getting long but I had to mention this to save anyone the same trouble. This truck is my first manual and first hydraulic clutch. The clutch pedal started sticking about a week ago on the first really cold morning. I didn't know what to think and I talked to my dad who is a Jet Engine mechanic as well as ASE blah blah blah. The dianosis was just some contaminated fluid? My dad also said that the system had a resovoir and that I should check it for fluid level. Well it so happened that it started doing it on xmas eve on the way to a friends house. The friend was fairly knowledgable about cars so I asked him about the problem and he said the same thing. Well at 8pm that night we pulled the cap off and saw the resovoir was empty and filled it up.
What is important to note here is I said didly squat about a diaphragm. I've seen them before on the brake system, know what they do, but I didn't know they would be on the clutch resovoir and my friend was nice enough to have it slip his mind. In other words I poured the brake fluid on top of the diaphragm resulting in a quite effective back pressure. This resulted in my clutch pedal no longer sticking but instead being completely useless. I assumed I had trapped air in the system and proceeded to futilely try to bleed the system for 2.5 days in 40 degree drizzle with the cap off but the diaphragm still in.
Wound up taking the inspection port off the tranny and saw the slave cylindar was leaking so we pulled the transmission to replace that. After the tranny was back in surprise surprise the problem was back. It was only when I bled the system with my syringe method (with a much older more knowledgable friend with me) that he saw the diaphragm get blown up while bleeding.
So did the slave cylindar need replacing, well it was leaking. But make sure if ur asked about a soft clutch pedal by a young man who doesn't have experience with this system that you make absolulutely sure that he knows about the diaphragm. Unless you just want to be really cruel and make him take down his first transmission.

 

on the external kind.. remove the cylenders from the vehicle with the system still connected.. manually bleed it by hand on the ground or what have you.

I am goign to try this since everything else had too many failures.