Hell, after a year of erratic and intermittent clutch problems, with symptoms that were too weird and sundry to innumerate. And, after the replacement of the cable!!! Argh!!! It finally, completely went yesterday! So today, I had a friend put it on the lift and replace it.

What we found, I'd never seen before!

Both the friction and pressure plates looked virtually BRAND NEW, lots of material left on the friction plate, pressure plate looked fine except for some concentric scoring, springs looked fine, too. Now, this is on a 13 year old GS-R, with 79K original miles But, then the weird part is, there were metal shavings, and chunks of burned and twisted steel inside the pressure plate. Like, WTF?

So after studying the damage for about 10-15 minutes, and not having any idea as to what had failed. what we found was, this. There's an inner retaining ring under the hub plate that sort of circles the the outer perimeter of the springs on the friction plate. That sorta, outer retaining had pieces missing as if they cracked and broke off inside, and then got caught inside the clutch housing, and caused scoring and chipping the mating surfaces. And then for some strange reason causing the total failure of the clutch yesterday, after a full year of weirdness. Just my observations on a weird conclusion to a strange set of symptoms.

Anyone, ever seen or heard of anything like this, before?