Clutch replacement

Do to my being a dumba## and purchasing a Autozone starter I now need to replace my 98 Jetta flywheel. Looking for a shop near Toledo Ohio to do this. Any recommendations where to go or not go would be helpful. Backup plan is to sell it. I'd rather keep it though. 250k miles and still gets 48mpg. Car is ugly except when I'm at the fuel island.

if you have a warm place to work, its not that bad of a job on the jetta. You dont need a lift, just jackstands is fine. Nothing too special about the tools needed.

The passats have a metal part of the inner fender in the way so they kinda suck to get the tranny back in...

At the end of the day though, a clutch job isnt a TDI or diesel specific thing. any shop can do it, especially anyone familiar with VWs.

why did it damage the flywheel? all those starters are remans and should be to spec, bad parts, poor finish quality and full of grit but i dont see why it would eat the teeth of a flywheel. the flywheel is a semi hard steel. the starter gear is usually an alloy that is softer so that when it does happen, the starter gets eaten. What happened?

Probably something like this happened, which is to common on the Valeo starters and why I refuse to use them. I just have the Bosch ones rebuilt locally.

This one was a Carquest 'lifetime' that was 6 months old, you can still see the scan tag on it. They took it back but didn't have another so they upped me to a Bosh remained since it'd be a week to get one of these in stock. I got lucky and have even had to have the remained Bosch rebuilt since then, but now it's still going strong since my rebuilder uses better parts. And yes, it was tightened properly, the casting was junk from the factory, even the counter people at Carquest couldn't believe how crappy it was.



I agree on finding a shop to replace the clutch. But if you're even remotely mechanically inclined it's not a hard job, and you can replace seals they'll miss while you're in there.

Good luck.

how would this damage the flywheel?

A piece broken off could become lodged and strip teeth. It doesn't take much. I've had to replace transmissions due to foreign objects punching a hole through them when they got into the flywheel area.

thats crazy, aluminum casting eating up hardened metal gear teeth! I guess the flywheel is softer than i thought. I did a file test to mine thinking i could mark it for top dead center but i could not get a file to bite, only skated across meaning that it was tempered steel.