So any help/ideas on this will be appreciated.

I drove my newly acquired 1996 civic hx around for ~200 miles (has 149k on it). Went to work one morning, everything was fine. Went to leave work and everytime I pushed the clutch in, it would scream at me. I could push the clutch in just enough to shift gears and keep it from screaming, but if I pushed it in any further, it would howl. Also noticed that the A/C and radio were totally out (figured I blew a fuse somehow). When ever I did push the clutch to the floor, the speedo would drop to 0 mph and my "brake" light would come on, of course those symptoms would go away after releasing the clutch. Most told me it was probably a throw-out bearing in the clutch and that's what I gathered from all the posts that I had read.

I wanted to have a good worry free 4th of July, so I decided to leave it alone till after the weekend and not tell my wife. 1 week later after siting in front of my house, I checked the fuse box. Since the radio and A/C totally went out and the speedo/"brake" light were acting funny, I figured it was an electrical induced problem even though I had a mechanical howl in the engine well.

I pulled out and inspected 2 relays and 2 fuses and all were good so I just put them back. So I held my breath and tried starting to car again and to my amazement the problem was gone. A/C and radio are working like normal and the SIL is working again (it had gone out several days before the howl started).

I still have no idea what the howl was but it's gone. I figure I'll put electrical grease on my fuses/relays to help their connections but other than that, I'm at a loss cause all I did was pull those relays and fuses and that's it.

Is there any way a throw out bearing could howl intermittently? I figured when one of those started going bad it never got better.

IDEAS?


Modified by gildo4realdo at 1:10 PM 7/12/2008