Friday morning I got into the family car (1998 VW Passat with manual transmission) and, depressing the clutch, started the engine. The car rocked backwards (I normally leave the gearshift in reverse when parked, plus the parking break was on), the engine died, and the clutch petal stayed on the floor (not good!). The clutch petal had lost all resistance, so I couldn’t shift the car. Looking under the hood, I found that a hose leading from the brake fluid reservoir had popped off and sprayed brake fluid around. I connected it back to the reservoir, and started the engine in Neutral, but the clutch didn’t magically start working. (Sigh…I like easy solutions.) Twenty Dollar bike to the rescue!
After biking to the MARTA station and getting to work, Erich said that it sounded like a hydraulic clutch system failure (Master/Slave cylinder problem, a leak, or just air in the system) and I researched the problem on the Internet enough to know that the first step would be to try and bleed the clutch system at the slave cylinder following the excellent directions here. Since I didn’t want to do a two-person bleeding job with only one person (and I didn’t have any spare DOT-4 synthetic break fluid laying around), I fired up the Van for it’s every 3 month drive and went to AutoZone on Saturday. I bought two quarts of DOT-4 and a MityVac hand-held vacuum pump for $41 (I’ve always wanted a vacuum pump…now I can make bells ring without noise).
I hooked the vacuum pump to the bleed valve, but pump as I might, I just couldn’t get much (any) brake fluid to flow from the reservoir. Finally I decided that perhaps the hose had been plugged, so I unhooked it and was able to draw a lot of air into the system. So I decided the hose was fine, and examined the nozzle to the brake fluid reservoir that it had been plugged into, expecting to find a grimy clog, which could explain why the clutch had failed in the first place! Nothing doing, the nozzle was shiny clean plastic. So shiny clean plastic, that I couldn’t get brake fluid to spill out of it. As it turns out, the nozzle needed to be cut open before the hose was attached to allow brake fluid to flow into the hose!
Closeup of the (uncut) nozzle
I assume the nozzle is not used in an automatic transmission vehicle, so the reservoir is designed to work with both types of systems, and the installer is supposed to be smart enough to cut open any nozzles they want to attach to hoses.
Looks like our installer wasn’t smart enough. I can’t imagine this being done at the factory, so the brake fluid reservoir must have been replaced, either in the two years before my wife bought the car, or the one time she took it to a shop to get the brake rotors turned. (Unless they accidentally broke the reservoir when bleeding the brakes, I can think of no reason for a shop to replace it while doing a standard brake job.) The interesting thing is that the clutch had been working for at least the last three years with no connection to the reservoir!
UPDATE: At least one other B5 Passat had the same issue, see the comment below. So it may be that there are other B5 Passat’s without this nozzle tip cut off from the factory. Luckily, it appears that the clutch cylinders work well without a refill for long periods of time….
It had been shifting a bit harder than usual over the last six months, but not bad enough for me to really worry about. After I bled the clutch system it does shift slightly more smoothly now, so I guess being able to drive the slave cylinder the whole way is a good thing! I went ahead and cut off the plastic tip on the nozzle and attached the hose with a hose-clamp, so hopefully it’s good for another 2-3 years until we get the breaks done again.
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