A couple months ago I put a ceramic clutch in my dodge 3500 diesel I bought it from NAPA. I have put many of clutches in but never a ceramic one, thought i would do it because of what i had read. I knew there would be clutch chatter but was not ready for what I got! So with that here is a little advice to anyone and everyone thinking about a cermic clutch;
1. They will chatter and cause problems a LOT OF CHATTER no such thing as a little chatter!
2. No one, even Napa or anyother mfg or distributer or dealer have any idea of why they chatter and no one on this forum has any factual thoughts why either.
3. They will cause severe damage to other parts of your drive train including your, u joints fly wheel and tranny. After a very short period of time running a cermic clutch will destroy your fly wheel its toast,gone and cannot be re-surfaced to use again.
4. If more then 25% of your driving is city or stop and go freeway type driving good luck things should start going bad within a few 1,000 miles, rear end clunk noise, axle damage, tires wearing and very noisy drive line, very unsafe and foolish to use one in this environment.
5. Why would anyone want one, really, be honest? Try backing up a 30 foot 12,000 pound loaded trailer with a cermic clutch on hard surface, its impossible.
6. Very bad on snow or ice but in 4x4 ceramic clutches work fine no chatter and guess what no one knows why they do not chatter in 4x4?
7. I sent out 72 emails over a 2 week period to ceramic clutch mfg,(china or mexico) dealers, tech forums and other places on the net and none of them knew why a ceramic clutch is better then the stock OEM in a street rig or why they cause such chatter.
8. With all the emails I got back they all agreed there is chatter and there is no such thing as break in of a ceramic clutch, making less noise probably indicates something is wearing out or broke! None of the response knew why or wanted to talk about its possible damage to other parts of your truck.
9. I took mine out after 2100 miles, added new U joints, gravel to my driveway,OEM fly wheel old one was destroyed, (that scared me to death) and piece of mind towing my trailer. Put in a complete OEM clutch assembly from NAPA that was a lot cheaper and guess what back to great fuel mileage, smooth shifting, easy backing in my trailer at the track, no distructive noises and most of all my wife can drive it once again!
So with all that give some feed back, I am thinking there won;t be much positive, if you have postive feed back give some facts or references to the info for credibility sake because these types of clutchs are not good for anyones daily driver.
Can;t wait to hear from you all I had a great time learning about these type of clutches, I do use something similar in my drag car where they do work pretty well at 700HP plus at 10K rpms starts.
But I replace them about every 20 runs if they stay together for that long!