Aloha. I own a '93 Mazda MX3 V6. I am the 3rd or 4th owner, and this poor car has been through hell, but if I can get all the kinks out, this will be the world's most amazing car for driving the Hana Highway, on Maui.

Biggest problem:

When I acquired this car, the clutch was burned out and I had to have a new one installed. Ever since I have owned it, I have thought that the clutch pedal had to be awfully close to the floor before the clutch would disengage. Recently, I have had trouble getting it into gear. Sometimes it will grind slightly before sliding into gear, and this is with the clutch pedal all the way to the floor.

One of the possibilities I considered, was that this was a clutch pedalfree-play-adjustment problem. While adjusting the free-play did help a little, I noticed, while I was down there, that there was some fluid around the base of the piston shaft that passed through the floor of the car, and what looked like drip trails on the floor around it. I assumed that his indicated a bad master clutch cylinder, but I read in another thread in this category, that it is usually the slave cylinder that goes bad (from Babyhuey). Should I replace one or both?

Also, I noticed that there are two switches which are actuated by the position of the clutch pedal. The switch which is actuated when the clutch pedal is released, is missing the rubber pad on its actuator plate and the switch passes right through the hole in the middle of the plate (it never gets acutated). What kind of problems will this cause?

Thanks for your help. I'll discuss my power steering problems in another post!

Ray
Somewhere under the clouds,
Nahiku, Hana, Maui

 

I would replace both as the master cylinder has 2 internal seals and could be bypassing. As for the switch's 1 is a starter lockout and the other is an input to the ECU to detect load so the BAC can kick the idle up to compensate and if it has cruise it kicks the cruise off when depressing the clutch pedal.