Failed Pressure Plate

[Dbelveal]

I did some searching and came up empty, so I'm curious how rare of a failure this is and what would have caused it. A few months ago my pressure plate had failed at around 110k miles on my '08. At this point I had only owned the car for about a year, with no previous maintenance records available, and I had put on about 10k miles with no drive train issues.

The only indication I had was a very distinct ticking that started during disengaging the clutch on my way to work. By the time I got it back home ~10 miles it was ticking 100% of the time. I had assumed some type of catastrophic throw out bearing failure, but that definitely was not the case. There was a small hole on the bottom of the bellhousing portion of the transmission.

I took it to a local shop who dropped the transmission to get a closer look, and found something had basically cut through the bell housing. Took a while, but I sourced a used transmission with 62k miles, and had them do a swap along with replacing clutch assembly and flywheel. Below is the aftermath of some sort of shim failing on the pressure plate, turning it into a circulating saw and cutting through the bell housing and damaging the flywheel as well. This damage was driving it about 12 miles after the failure.

These are all the pictures I have, and I chucked everything but the transmission. Anyone else see/hear of this happening before?

[waterpanda]

Subscribed! I personally haven't had any issues with my 6MT yet but considering all the "normal" weird noises the 6MT supposedly exhibits, I'll be keeping my eyes and ears close to the symptoms you described.

[Bubbles]

Wow, that’s a rare failure for this model run. The flywheel was updated at some point but it was marketed as a response to reduce chatter.

[Dbelveal]

Yeah, I assume it was the original flywheel from '08 but I never verified. The local shop I took it to hadn't seen this type of failure before. I ended up going with the newer style LUK flywheel and a OEM clutch kit. I can't tell a difference in chatter.

The pedal pressure to disengage is significantly less after the replacement and more closely matches the E90 335i I had before, so that's a plus.

[deansbimmer]

This reminded me of a thread I made a few years ago.

https://www.m3post.com/forums/showth...0#post21106010

[fsmtnbiker]

Mine looked exactly the same when I did it. '09 w/ 120k miles. Machete'd the bellhousing too.

[Bubbles]

Originally Posted by deansbimmer

This reminded me of a thread I made a few years ago.

https://www.m3post.com/forums/showth...0#post21106010

I missed this post, thanks for the link. Are there any warning signs for this aside from the normal death rattle?