SWMBO's '96 Infiniti has manual transmission, hydraulic clutch. About 200k miles on the car, and I've replaced both the clutch slave cylinder and the clutch master cylinder once already. Slave was probably done about 4 or 5 years ago, and the master was done about 2 years ago. Now that the weather has gotten cool (40 degrees at night), the clutch is misbehaving. The pedal will go almost to the floor before engaging, and often will stick in the down position and stop engaging the clutch (so the engine and transmission are stuck in whichever gear you started in, usually either reverse or first gear). After the car warms up, behavior becomes normal. When it happened to me, I found that if I pumped the clutch pedal five or ten times but only using about 1/2 of the stroke (i.e. ending the down-stroke just before normal engagement point), then it would work normally once or twice, but then revert to 'no clutch', especially if I tried to hold the clutch pedal down for more than a second or two. I think that the master cylinder is probably bad (again), which is disappointing because it's probably only got about 20k miles on it and I bought it from a dealer, AND it is a real pain in the butt to R&R. Slave cylinder is older, and the replacement is NOT and OE part from the dealer, but whatever I could find at FLAPS as the original failed with no warning. I'll check the MC to see if there's any sign of leakage using the taste test. Could this be caused by using DOT 4 fluid, when the owner's manual says to use DOT 3? I guess flushing/bleeding the system with the proper fluid might be a good first step. -Max
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