I hate the inevitable. I've pretty much known for the last two years that the Experimental Chassis would need some major engine work sometime this year. I've also known that the obnoxious brattling in the trans bellhousing would involve a clutch change to fix. While I've been regularly verifying my diagnoses between waiting for stoplights, I've made no attempt to fix it. And now the inevitable has happened.

Last Thursday, the head gasket went at cylinder 3. I noticed milky blowby pooling in one of the elbows in the intake a couple weeks ago, so I should have been prepared for it. Instead I was stuck running K&W Head Gasket & Block Repair through the cooling system 24 hours before I needed to be in Massachusetts for Jennifer's graduation.

In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid mistake on my part. When I saw black puffs coming from the muffler and had pulled two fouled plugs out of cylinder 3 I should have noticed that injector 3 had a torn lower O ring. Instead I let the combustion chamber fill with gas as it sat at Metropark, and let myself blow out the gasket as I fired the car with one flooded cylinder. At least the K&W nanotechnology crap worked. Though I expected that. I accidentally stuck my hand in the mixture at one point, and I could swear I could feel the nanites crawling on my skin.

The head gasket in a bottle stuff held up well enough to get me the 230 miles to Springfield Friday evening. Then about 200 miles into the trip back, I lost all feel in the clutch pedal on 287. On first sight, it looked like the metal portion of the cable adjuster had pulled itself out of the plastic knob. But when the pedal didn't come back after I rigged a fix, I realized that the clutch had gone. Good thing I didn't refuse that tow home.

Turns out that incident was my fault too. When I torqued down the clutch pressure plate, I didn't torque everything back in the correct order. The resulting vibration knocked off one of the clips holding the throwout bearing to the clutch arm. That caused the disc to warp, which allowed two out of four clutch springs to break free of their retainers and pop right out of the clutch. Whoops.

So what have I learned from all this? Judging from the fact that I'm running with 3 crossmember bolts (there are supposed to be 4) and I have a keychain ring holding my clutch cable to the transmission, not a whole lot. At least I have a package coming from Courtesy Nissan, with which I will waste 2 hours of my weekend doing nothing but correcting my own mistakes. God I hate the inevitable.