[Zeke]

Wayne, thanks for your information. I have had many, many cars over the years and most were sticks. I've never smoked a clutch on any including the Corvettes I drove as a young driver (you can assume I did a lot of drag racing, which I did). I did see a couple to the end of their life, but once they slipped, they never came back. I was able to adjust the linkage on a couple more that were simply not working well when I got the car. I musta had a dozen VW's in addition to the 'Merican Iron.

When you say "
Bottomline, this is normal, and would probably happen in any car, I haven't had the same experience.

So, what still puzzles me is the fact that I was able to start and start again and again with no symptoms until I got into 4th. Now I fully well know the torque forces on the clutch disc increase as the mechanical advantage decreases in each successive higher gear. I'm still skeptical about the the episode. But, yes, in the long run, I'm sure the disc is in it's latter days.

As I said, in the old days, if you glazed a clutch disc and blued the pressure plate, you needed to replace them. They were never the same chattering and so forth. So, you're telling me that the modern day Sachs will fade like a brake pad and recover?

Hard for an old man to digest.

One more point: using the brake example, the hot pads lose their effectiveness, but at the same time the fluid might boil. I think we can assume the boiling fluid does not do the job and the effect is the same, soft pedal. Someone on the PPBB (Porsche Pete's Boxster BBS, for the unlikelihood that anyone here doesn't know) suggested that my clutch hydraulic fluid got that hot. So far I'm not convinced. That would seem to have the opposite effect than that of slipping, i.e., hard shifting.

The people on PPBB aren't really tech people. There used to be several. They told of how you could hack the computer to get the dash display to read all the readouts that were possible only if you ordered that option. The option was on one of the stalks, I don't remember which. They used a rocker switch on the dash. Pretty techie to me.

I hope that's in the book.