Slippage Diagnosis
2001 Mazda Miata six speed. Pretty much overnight after 1.5 months of having it started to slip pretty bad.
In first gear when releasing the clutch no matter how I did it it would jitter a lot, same thing with first second 2nd to 3rd. And whenever I was in first second or third and I would rev up the car the RPMs would move but the car wouldn't go along with it as it should. This pretty much happened overnight.
I decided I should swap out the clutch since the car was new to me and knew nothing about the maintenance history. After removing the transmission I saw the following. (Pictures)
Caked up oil in the bell housing. The clutch has plenty of material left and looks fine. I never overheated the clutch while I had it.
The flywheel was smooth and had no grooves or sign of overheating. I decided to change the clutch, pressure plate, throwout bearing, pilot bearing, resurface the flywheel, change the input shaft seal, input shaft retainer cover seal, rear main seal, Halfmoon seal, change fluids, etc.
After all this the car drove fine but 100 miles in the clutch master cylinder went out. So I changed the clutch master and slave cylinder and put new fluid. Now the car drives fine but I am curious as to what could have caused the initial slippage. I don't mind having done any of this since it was leaking oil anyway and it was something that I wanted to do anyway just to get it over with.