Anyone running a hydraulic clutch with their 833?

Right.

I bought Chuck's kit also and it stayed in my car for about an hour. Outside of the car on a test rig the slave would compress as you would expect. But when I installed it in the car it would just not budge. Totally stuck.

After my mechanic looked at it he gave up after a day of trying.

Finally I just gave up on it and bought a new z-bar linkage setup from Brewer's. Strangely, when I installed the new z-bar it wouldn't actuate either. I called Brewer's and they gave me the whole story: if you go to a larger bell housing from a smaller one, and I did (from a 9" to 10.5") then you need the longer clutch fork and correct pivot. I knew about the pivot. I didn't know about the fork. The Brewer's part number for the fork is CF702N if you have an early-A like I do. The longer fork is something like 10 7/8" in length. I bought the longer fork and pivot and it solved everything. By then I was irritated with the hydraulic setup, and the new z-bar was already in place, so now the whole kit is sitting in a soupy mess in my garage.

Two problems here:

(1) We go round-robin from where we started. The original poster needs more room for headers, but the increased fork length could still interfere if you have the larger bell housing, but it would probably less difficult than the z-bar linkage.

(2) Chuck didn't know about the fork length issue. Instead, he told me that it would work regardless of the length. He wasn't trying to screw with me. He just really didn't know. I let him know about that and he understood.

What happens is that the way the aluminum slave cylinder mount bolts to the transmission leaves no room for slop, and thankfully so. If the fork and pivot are in the wrong place, it effectively wedges the slave pushrod and won't allow it to move. Just by looking it at you wouldn't be able to tell, so its a bit spooky.

The other thing I didn't like was that if you mount the master cylinder in the stock location, the total clutch pedal travel is about three inches. The only way out of that is to somehow mount the master cylinder way up high in the firewall right near the apex of the pedal. I mentioned this to Chuck and he sent me a nice bracket that would mount the master cylinder inside the cabin at a steep angle to solve the problem, otherwise at that height the master cylinder would sit right in the face of the master brake cylinder. I have power brakes, so that wouldn't work. The new mounting bracket is not so easy to install in such a tight environment. So difficult in fact that one would be better off removing the pedal cluster and installing it with everything else out of the way.

Anyway, these are lessons learned from my ill-fated install. Hopefully it will help others. I wish I had found a way to get it installed on my car because I love the benefits.

In other news, if anyone wants to buy my (slightly used) kit plus the adapter plate I'm willing to part with it for $250. PM me if interested.

-marcus