After an impassioned plea to the Grand Prix forum for help with this clutch problem, Josh Harrell, aka oldskoolgp, sprang up with a solution and dropped by on Saturday. He’s one of the only people who really knows his way around the Getrag 284 transaxle, and he explained that all this work was for naught – the engine/transmission assembly has to be disassembled and reinstalled. The throwout bearing isn’t supposed to be snapped into the pressure plate’s bearing race until after the entire assembly is together, and separating it back out won’t be easy.
After lifting the engine/trans back off the cradle and taking it all back apart, we then struggled with the bearing all evening. Without any progress nor any solution in sight, we gave up for the night late on Saturday. It just isn’t apparent how the bearing is held in place while the bearing is in place!
Sunday morning we went to Autozone to take a look at a virgin pressure plate and try to figure out a solution. It looks basically like this:
The throwout bearing snaps into the center of the pressure plate and looks like this:
After scratching our heads for a bit we saw it – there is a big snap-ring in the center of the bearing cage (not visible in the pic above) that holds the throwout bearing in place that we couldn’t see before. Josh and I both had a eureka moment – get some snap-ring pliers, and try expanding it. It worked! I bought the pliers and rushed back to the house. I expanded the ring, and the throwout bearing literally fell right out of the pressure plate. Problem solved!
Some rust had accumulated on the flywheel and pressure plate over the winter, so that had to be sanded off, but once that was done we reassembled the clutch and put the transmission back together with the engine. Josh seated the throwout bearing into the pressure plate with a click, and we were done.
With that solved, now came the final preliminaries to reinstall everything back into the car. The cradle needed painting, so I did that.
The transmission mount had been damaged during the initial engine removal, so I repaired that with heavy-duty 2-part epoxy.
We’ve decided to reinstall the cradle back onto the car first, and then put the engine back in from the top. This will make it much easier to reconnect the power steering rack to the column, without the engine in the way.