Helping my nephew bleed the clutch on his MA Miata, and we are running into an issue I've never seen before.
He'd had issues where it did not want to shift into gear, so we assumed the hydraulics were the issue. Reverse is the main gear it wouldn't go into but the others were hard sometimes. Replaced the slave cylinder and bled it, and got a bit more pedal resistance but didn't fix the issue.
Moved onto the clutch master cylinder. Bench bled it, installed it and started bleeding it. Pedal had resistance for the first round of bleeding, but after the slabs cylinder bleeder was opened and closed, there was no resistance on the clutch pedal. After waiting a few minutes it comes back. We let it gravity bleed for a while, but no luck.
Eventually, we redid the bench bleed, just on the car this time, and got tons more air. Pedal resistance went way up now, but as soon we opened and closed the bleeder valve again, no resistance. It came back after a while. Goes into all gears but reverse.
Any thoughts on what we are doing wrong? Front end is jacked up a bit, but I'd think that won't cause any new issues, since the clutch line already goes over the height of the master cylinder. Any chance the soft line is collapsing internally? There's no leaks that we see.
I left my vacuum bleeder at home, so I could go grab it, but don't feel like doing that unless it is likely to work.
