Clutch troubleshooting

First post so please show mercy! I was driving down the highway last week and my clutch demonstrated textbook slipping symptoms - hit the gas and my tac jumped 500 rpm but felt no additional acceleration. Ive Already priced out labor and parts but was wondering if there was a way of adjusting the clutch cable to change how it engages the flywheel to confirm its not an easy fix before shelling out at least good 7-8 hundred in parts and labor on a complete replacement. Clutch has 70k on it. I do not have the resouces to perform this task by myself so replacing it by myself is not an option. Thanks for any advice.

 

Do you have 4 cylinder or 6 cylinder?

 

Its a 4.

 

Unfortunately it's a common problem for 2005-2011 4 cylinder 5 speed manuals. I had the same thing happen to my truck. Toyota released a Technical Service Bulletin for the defect, but it only covered trucks in the first 3 years / 36000 miles. You can read more about it here:
http://www.tacomahq.com/758/tacoma-tsb-5-speed-manual-clutch-disk-defect/

You can try to talk to your dealer to see if you can get discounted parts or labor out of them since this is a known issue. I had no such luck but I heard others have. It's total BS and angers me. We're stuck with the bill because we didn't put our trucks through as much abuse and made the clutch last a few thousand miles longer than the projected failure? Anyways, I ended up going aftermarket with a Centerforce clutch. With all of the money I was spending, I figured the extra 100-200 was worth it to get a heavy duty clutch. Make sure you find a shop that can get your flywheel resurfaced, as buying a new one can be expensive. For whatever reason, flywheels for these trucks are rare and there are no aftermarket options (unlike the V6 or previous generation of 4 cylinders of Tacoma which have several options). They run $300-350 from Toyota. And there are very limited options on eBay as well, which I found to be shocking.

 

Thank you for the detailed response. I have an ace mechanic who just offered his services for free which is really great and fortunate. How many miles have you put on the new clutch? Would you recommend that brand? I definitely do not want to skimp on parts and find myself in the same spot 4 years from now. I appreciate the time you took to write out to your repsonse, and I'll definitely check out the link.

 

Welcome to Tacoma World! I'm just paying forward the kindness some of the other members have shown me in the past. This is the best car/truck forum I've ever been on.

I would definitely recommend Centerforce. I have the stage II clutch. It's the same price as the stage I for some reason. There's also a higher-end dual-friction clutch as well, but I figured that was overkill for my application. I've had the Centerforce clutch installed on my truck for about 20,000 miles so far and I love it. I had a similar option of cheap labor for my clutch. My friend is a service advisor at a dealership and gets me very cheap after hours work from his techs. The only issue I ran into was that since it was after hours, they couldn't send the flywheel out to get resurfaced, so I had to buy a new one. I still saved a couple hundred versus going to a regular shop and I have a back-up flywheel now for the future.