no worries

 

ATTENTION : Today, 5/10/2009(yeah, its a sunday, and Mother's day too) The Department of Transportation from the government has contacted me about Pictures of the broken bracket. Im trying to find it and send it him. So I suggest whoever have a picture of the broken bracket should contact me first via pm

This is not an "Isolated" issue and Mazda should really do something about it.

 

Pm'd.

 

pm'd back

So whoever had a broken clutch bracket, or soon to be broken. should pm me first, then I will give you the information to send it out.

We really need to get Mazda to do something about this. Just imagine if the clutch breaks in the middle of highway speed and you can't pull your gear out and you need to brake fast ... it might happen to you !

 

nycgps, thanks for the update. Hope DOT forces a safety recall on this problem. Has not happened to me yet, but I'm afraid it will.

 

Well, I already gave the link to this thread to the person responsible for this case. So he should be checking this out real soon.

Anyway in the mean time, if you have any picture of the broken bracket. please post them up.

 

Sent you a PM nyc.

 

Got it and replied !

 

Add one to the failed clutch brackets list. My mileage is under 40k and I had the tell-tale squeaking. I read this thread, pulled my clutch bracket out to have the preventive welding done, and sure enough the weak seam I've seen in the posts had already torn halfway through. The welding cost me $20. And that was for full seam welds at all possible failure points. An ounce of prevention FTW.

I did report it on the NHTSA site. This is super-easy, BTW.

 

Just make sure you take a picture before your "fix"

Its evidence u know

Thanks a lot.

 

Thanks to nycgps, et al, we could be getting a clutch pedal bracket recall.

 

Please hurry. haha... My bracket is starting to squeak... shiittt...

 

Hopefully mazda will beef it up pretty good if they have to recall it, and not add a couple welds here and there and say there's your recall.

 

I still remember that service manager's face that day when he said this is a "one time repair" only ... his face was full of "wow you are such a trouble maker."

Again, A clutch bracket should NOT break like this under ANY normal condition. So if u havent do so, go and take your clutch bracket out and check it, the cracks/damages are VERY noticeable, if there is any, take a picture of it, let me know, and fix your bracket ASAP.

 

^ I will do that. I'm an engineer. I know how things should be designed. It's too easy to design a piece of metal that won't fail in the lifetime of a car. I also know engineering ethics and it's obviously in the car because there was some break of ethics somewhere... either enough stress testing wasn't done, or the engineers consented to the business managers cutting corners to save money and time.

The only RIGHT thing to do on Mazda's end is to fix this problem with a RECALL. END. OF. STORY. It should not be up to us driver's to fix a CLUTCH issue.

 

Agreed... in the engineering world, safety items are kinda one of those things you just cant afford to f- up.
It almost sounds like, with the weld issue, that it was a mfg problem, but still should've been caught

I still gotta check out my pedal and see what it looks like

 

So, I thought I should add something here so Mazda doesn't look like the only bad guy. When I took my pedal assembly to be welded, the guy at the shop said he'd seen a lot of this lately. He said he's had Mazdas, Hondas and yes, Toyotas in with clutch-pedal failure issues. In fact, he said he had to weld the firewalls on a few Hondas where the clutch pedal was mounted and had torn through. Not that this makes it okay for Mazda to skimp, but it's not just them.

 

Attnetion everybody ... Cutting corners is not the solution ...

 

and I guarantee you the blame is on Mazda's "Gram team" where they cut weight at all costs.

http://www.mazda.co.uk/showroom/mx-5...oss-programme/

 

Partly, but seam welds would solve the problem without adding weight. Hell, a couple more spot welds might do the trick.

 

i def wouldn't rely on just spot weld. hell theres not much i would trust a spot weld for

 

Sorry to say beast, but the metal is to thin also. It broke with the nut on it, then broke the weld also.

 

right

 

 

It's pretty evident that Mazda should have done a better job on the clutch pedal bracket construction. At any man-machine interface, where you have varying wear potential (some are harder on their clutch pedals than others), you need to design for the worst case percentile.

But as far as the overall weight reduction discussion (e.g. plastic parts), we need light weight and a little cropping here and there adds up. Heck, we only have a 1.3L rotary to work with, so it's either a light weight vehicle and/or FI to get decent performance.