About a month ago, I had to replace my clutch master cylinder and slave cylinder in my '98 Tacoma, 3.4L, 5 speed. Everything seems to have worked okay. I will say that I may not have bled all of the air out of the system, though. For some reason when bleeding the clutch, the fluid coming out of the slave cylinder bleeder screw was foamy no matter how much I bled it. Eventually I gave up, as the clutch seemed to be working just fine.

Yesterday, I noticed that the clutch is slipping when accelerating quickly or accelerating up hill. The truck has 265K on the original clutch, so I knew this day would come.

My question is, could the slippage be related to the master/slave cylinder replacement? Is it possible that air in the clutch hydraulic system is causing or exacerbating the slippage?

Or, is this all just a coincidence?

Thanks for the help.

 

Vigilante, with a hydraulic clutch having air in the system will make it hard or impossible to shift, it will never cause the clutch to slip.
If your clutch is slipping either the clutch is worn out or it is soaked with oil or hydraulic fluid or your pedal doesn't have enough freeplay and isn't allowing the hydraulic pressure to fully release which keeps the pressure plate from completely clamping down on the clutch disc.

 

Akwheeler, thank you very much for the response and information. I'm pretty sure the old clutch is just worn out. I'll get it replaced in the not-too-distant future. It doesn't slip too badly, so I'm not in a big rush.