S
Steph
Our LW-200 is starting to annoy us.
Seems like there is a terrible shortage of knowledgeable [saturn]
mechanics that know anything about this car and it's manual
transmission.
Since just under 30,000 miles the clutch has acted up/weird on us.
Essentially it first showed up after driving about 90 miles on the
freeway, I went to put down the clutch to downshift and it went to the
floor. I was able to speed shift and pumping the clutch pedal seemed to
maybe make a little difference.
On very cold mornings the clutch acts up in the reverse.... the pedal
travel is only 1-3 inches to fullly disengage, this floating enageg
point of the pedal makes for some comical backing the car out of the
driveway -- unfortunately my spouse doesn't find me laughing at her
stalling the car very amusing.
So this clutch issue has been going on for about 25,000 miles now.
Saturn has looked at it at least three times, never finding anything
wrong. They did a bleed on whatever system the clutch runs off and it
seemed to improve for awhile.
Then about 50,000 the power steering started to groan loudly and
intermittently lose power-assist -- again mostly only in the mornings,
and only noticeable when turning the wheel left (where it would
violently vibrate between assisted and non-assisted turning) while
groaning and creaking. After warming up the power steering behaves.
So, the $75,000 question is does anyone know if the power-assist and
clutch share a hydraulic assembly in the manual transmission LW-200 ?
By the way, the final straw was yesterday the wife called to say the A/C
quit. I had complained many times about the compressor engaging only to
have it dismissed as normal sounds and behavior (the computer would
cycle the a/c compressor shortly after starting the engine, which I
understand could be normal, however it would sometimes do so too early
or not compensate with enough throttle rpm and nearly stall out the
engine).
So we dropped it off yesterday and hope for some mechanic-savant to
actually locate the real issue(s).
Seems like there is a terrible shortage of knowledgeable [saturn]
mechanics that know anything about this car and it's manual
transmission.
Since just under 30,000 miles the clutch has acted up/weird on us.
Essentially it first showed up after driving about 90 miles on the
freeway, I went to put down the clutch to downshift and it went to the
floor. I was able to speed shift and pumping the clutch pedal seemed to
maybe make a little difference.
On very cold mornings the clutch acts up in the reverse.... the pedal
travel is only 1-3 inches to fullly disengage, this floating enageg
point of the pedal makes for some comical backing the car out of the
driveway -- unfortunately my spouse doesn't find me laughing at her
stalling the car very amusing.
So this clutch issue has been going on for about 25,000 miles now.
Saturn has looked at it at least three times, never finding anything
wrong. They did a bleed on whatever system the clutch runs off and it
seemed to improve for awhile.
Then about 50,000 the power steering started to groan loudly and
intermittently lose power-assist -- again mostly only in the mornings,
and only noticeable when turning the wheel left (where it would
violently vibrate between assisted and non-assisted turning) while
groaning and creaking. After warming up the power steering behaves.
So, the $75,000 question is does anyone know if the power-assist and
clutch share a hydraulic assembly in the manual transmission LW-200 ?
By the way, the final straw was yesterday the wife called to say the A/C
quit. I had complained many times about the compressor engaging only to
have it dismissed as normal sounds and behavior (the computer would
cycle the a/c compressor shortly after starting the engine, which I
understand could be normal, however it would sometimes do so too early
or not compensate with enough throttle rpm and nearly stall out the
engine).
So we dropped it off yesterday and hope for some mechanic-savant to
actually locate the real issue(s).
