SPEC Clutch Kit Stage 3-Plus GT 03/2011-2017/Boss 302 2012-2013

A lot of people have asked me, what clutch I run on my 2015 Mustang. Now if you're not familiar with my car, back when this car only had 700 miles on it, I installed a Roush Phase 1 Supercharger Kit making just over 600 to the tire. Believe it or not, 30,000 miles later this car is still on the factory clutch. It is starting to slip however, so today I'm going to upgrade the clutch with a SPEC clutch and flywheel. Now the clutch that I chose to go with is the SPEC Stage 3 Plus Clutch Kit. I wanted to go with a single disc clutch for my setup but this is gonna be probably the strongest single disc out there that still has a good pedal feel. Now the 3 Plus comes with this custom Faro carbon disc and a heavy duty pressure plate along with a bearing and the installation tool. Now to make the engagement a little bit softer, I'm going with the aluminum flywheel.

Now this is an SFI SPEC flywheel and the nice thing with this, the aluminum is less rotating weight, but also provides a little bit of a softer hit, which will be good for the factory transmission. The flywheel is a direct replacement and is SFI certified, so it is legal for racing if we ever chose to do that with this car. This clutch will hold up to 850 pound feet of torque, which is much more than the car's making, which gives us room to grow in the future. The main reason I'm doing this, like I said, the factory clutch, just starting to slip a little bit We actually have a five day event playing with this car where it's gonna see road course and drag racing. So a new clutch is definitely a good idea. This installation will require a good set of basic hand tools. There's no special tools really needed. A bearing puller will be easier, but there are other ways to get the bearing out. But besides that, ratchets, sockets, and wrenches are pretty much all you're gonna need.

We're gonna start the installation inside here. We're actually starting under the hood by disconnecting the battery. The next step is we're gonna remove the shift knob in the boot. Now in my case, I have a Barton hybrid three shifter on my car, which is attached to the transmission. So that'll come out underneath the car, but either way, you want to start by removing the shift knob and boot from the interior. We're gonna carefully remove the boot. Now if you're removing a factory one, there will be three little tabs for the lockout. Now with the Barton, a lockout goes into one solid plastic piece. So it is a little bit harder to remove than your factory one would be. We're gonna start with the two bolts in the front. We're gonna remove the top plate from the consul. Now to remove the top piece, you actually gotta start prying in the back and it's held on by clips. Remove these two side panels. Remove the two 7 millimeter screws and you can release the clips and pull up on the top plate. Then separate the rubber seal from the floor.

Okay. Now we can move onto the car. Now this step here is gonna be specific to the Barton. With the Barton, it's modular. It allows you to remove the top piece, so we're gonna do that as well to make it easier to get the transmission out. Okay now we're underneath the car. Now we already removed our stock exhaust, which is very easy to do and the next step is we're gonna remove these two pipes here. This one actually is further forward and this is the extension piece back here. Now since we're removing the Cadillac converter, we're gonna disconnect the oxygen sensor. We're also gonna disconnect the other plugs on the passenger side of the transmission while we're here. This will all have to be disconnected for removal. Now there's two bolts we gotta remove to remove the Cadillac converter. One is easy to reach from down here. We're gonna loosen that one first. Then we're gonna actually put an extension in place and go to the top to get the other one off. Now you can see up top where the extension is, we're gonna remove that bolt from up here.

Okay, now we're gonna remove the drive shaft so we can work on removing the transmission. What you want to do is hold the driveshaft in place and then remove the bolts and this obviously is an aftermarket driveshaft, but the factory one's gonna come off the same way. Once all the bolts are out, you will have to kind of pry on the driveshaft to get it separated from the rear. Now in our case, our Dynotech driveshaft does not clear the loop with the flange on it, so we're gonna remove bolts on the side of our Barton flange because we gotta remove the driveshaft. Now we're gonna work on the transmission itself. First what we want to do is support the transmission safely with our pole jack here and we're gonna remove the cross member. All right now we're gonna disconnect all the harnesses on the passenger side of the transmission before we start to remove it. Before we work on the trans bolts, we're gonna remove the starter. Obviously make sure your battery is disconnected. It should be by now anyway. But definitely make sure it's disconnected before you touch the starter.

All right, so now you can remove some of the clips and start working on the transmission bolts. What we're gonna do now is disconnect the line that comes down from the master cylinder to our transmission. This is your fluid line. There's a small little spring clip on here. You will lose a little bit of fluid. So make sure you have a way to clean it up. Here's a close up of the clutch line so you can see. Basically, what you're gonna do is pull this little clip out and that will release the line and allow you to separate it. I know it's hard to see, so we're gonna show it to you off the car as well. All right now what we're gonna do is use a ratchet strap just to go around trans jack to hold it in place. All right, the trans is supported and secure. Now we can remove the four remaining bolts and then separate the trans from the engine. Okay, now that we got it loose now…what we're gonna do now is just sort of shimmy the transmission back to separate the bell housing from the engine.

All right, so we're ready to remove our factory clutch. What we're gonna do now is grab the input shaft tool that comes with the new clutch. We're gonna put it up into place. That's gonna hold the disc while we remove the bolts for the pressure plate. Okay, now we can remove the clutch bolts. Okay, with the bolts out, now we can remove the disc and pressure plate. All right, so now with the clutch off, we're gonna take the flywheel off next. Basically you're just gonna remove the bolts and then pop it off the engine. All right, so before we start putting it back together, we're gonna replace the pilot bearing as well. The clutch kit comes with a new one. So we're gonna remove our original one. There's a couple different ways to do this. A puller is the easiest. But there's a lot of kind of old school methods you can look up online as well. Now you want to make sure you clean this out before you install the new one then you want to put some grease on the new one. We're gonna hammer it in place.

You also want to make sure this does not come off. This part is removable. It may fall off. Make sure that is in place before you install the new one. The easiest way to install the new one is to get a socket that clears the outside edge of the bearing and just use that to hammer it in place. What we're gonna do now is figure out exactly what hardware we need out here and where the dowels are going to go. To do that, basically what we're gonna do is just put the clutch up here. Line up the holes with the bolts. It's really only gonna fit one way. You want to make when it lines up with the bolts, it'll also tell you where the dowels are going to go and it'll be three locations for the dowels. They line up as well. There are extra bolts in the flywheel, so you want to make sure you remove them. Then you'll want to hammer the dowels into place. Okay, now we're gonna put the flywheel up into place. Line up the holes. Now we're installing ARP hardware.

This is one place where I do recommend an upgrade. You can reuse the factory bolts if you want to. The ARPs are gonna be a lot stronger. Again, this is something you don't want to do too often. So for a couple extra dollar, in my opinion, they're worth it. Now the ARPs do have their own torque SPEC and come with assembly lube. Make sure you put that on before you put the bolts in place. Now we're just gonna get them all tight and then torque them to spec. You want to make sure now if you're using different hardware like the ARP, the torque SPEC, a lot of time, is not the same as the factory torque SPEC. For example, the ARP is 70 pound feet. The factory torque SPEC is a little bit different. Also, when torqueing in the SPEC, you want to make sure you do the star pattern. Don't just go around in a circle. You want to criss cross so it's nice and even. All right, now we're ready to actually put the clutch into place.

What you'll want to do is put the input shaft alignment tool on the disc and again, make sure you put the disc in the correct way. There is a train side and a flywheel side. Once you get the disc up into place and seated, not you can put the pressure plate up and then bolt it down. Now installing the clutch bolt, you want to put a little dab of blue Loctite on there just because, again, it is a clutch bolt. You want to make sure these stay tight. When you're installing them, we're gonna install all the clutch bolts that were included, which is actually more than the factory setup. When you put these on, again, you're gonna tighten them in a star pattern and then we'll have a unique torque SPEC. We contacted SPEC and they said to torque these to 47 foot pound. All right, now you can remove the alignment tool and we're ready to reinstall our transmission.

When putting the trans in, you want to make sure you get the dowels lined up on both sides. You don't want to use the bolts to draw it in. You want to make sure it is lined up and flush before you put the hardware in or you can damage the input shaft. All right, now that we got the transmission up into place. We got a couple bolts in. Everything's lined up. Now we're gonna connect the clutch line while the transmission's still supported. Remember there's that little clip. So all you do is just slide it over and pop the clip in place. Transmission bolted in. Now we're gonna start working on the harnesses and this harness here, you gotta make sure you fish over. Now what we're gonna do is actually bolt the transmission back to our cross member so we can remove our transmission jack and then work on the wiring. And now pretty much everything we removed, we're going to reinstall, starting with the starter. All right now we're gonna move on to driveshaft. All right, now back in the interior, we're gonna reinstall the shifter in the consul.

Okay, so everything's back together. Now is the fun part. It's actually bleeding the clutch. Now the clutch system in this car is what's considered a self-bleeding system. So there is no bleeder screw. So you have two options. One, hook up a vacuum pump to the cap. You're probably not gonna have that. The other way to do it is simply pump the pedal. When you first start, you may have to actually lift the pedal up by hand unless you have the spring still. But you'll have to pump it literally it could be 50, 75, 100 times. But you want to pump it until you start getting a pedal feel. Once you get a pedal feel, then we hook up the battery, make sure our fluid is topped off and then we can actually take it for a test drive.

One other thing we want to mention is when you do a clutch and a flywheel on your S550, you're going to have to do a crank relearn. Now what happens, once you start driving the car and it goes through its normal cycle, you're gonna get a misfire code. It's actually not a misfire, but the crank has to be reprogrammed. Now to do that, you got two options. One, go to the dealer. The other, you have an SCT XCal4, you simply go into Vehicle Functions. Click on that. Go to Special Functions. Click on that. Turn your ignition on and then you see Crank Relearn. Just click OK and it'll do it for you. Now the clutch is bled, we have a good pedal feel. The master cylinder's full. We're gonna fire it up and make sure everything engages like it should up on the lift before we go for a test drive.

Now a couple things I want to mention real quick is you want to make sure you use DOT 4 fluid. Only use that. Don't use anything else when you fill up the master cylinder. Also, if you're putting the car up in the air like we did and checking to make sure you have engagement movement, kill the traction control. If you leave it on, you'll hit the gas and nothing will happen. So you want to make sure you turn that off beforehand. Now we're actually gonna take it for a test drive and see how it drives.

Now the first thing you'll notice with a new clutch is the engagement point will probably be a little different than you're used to. Might be a little bit higher. Might be a little bit lower, depending how your clutch was and you might get a little bit of chatter. I mean, so far, the SPEC clutch, not at all. I mean, I can definitely feel the engagement. It's more aggressive than I was used to and you guys know I love using that word. But it definitely is. It gauges a little sharper than I'm used to with my old clutch. But again, my old clutch was slipping so I was only honestly probably getting used to that soft feel. Now it feels good. I mean, no chatter at all. Gauges nice at the top. It's got a real solid feel to it. Now remember, on your test drive like this, don't beat on it. The last thing you want to do with a brand new clutch is pull in a parking lot and lay into it. Now they always say about 500 miles is a good break in for a clutch.

This one, being the carbon, the semi-metallic pedal, this will break in a little faster than your normal style Kevlar clutch would. But you still want to put some miles on it. I mean, definitely put a couple hundred miles on it before you even try going wide open throttle and throttle because it will slip and if you get to slip too badly, you can actually glaze the clutch and it'll make it really hard to get it broken in properly. But the pedal feel is great. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I was a little worried about it being a high horsepower single disc versus the soft feel you get with your twin disc clutch. But now the pedal feels really good. I mean, it feels almost like stock. I mean to be honest with you, maybe a little bit heavier, but barely noticeable. But now if you're looking for a new clutch for your S550, there are plenty of really nice single disc setups out there that are a lot more affordable than your twin disc clutch. I mean, that's one of the reasons I went with this clutch.

This will hold 800 pound feet of torque and it's less than $500. I mean, that's a pretty good deal for the clutch. Like I said, the engagement on it is very, very good and SPEC offers several different levels. They have their stage 1, which would basically be a stock replacement clutch and then there's the 2, the 2 plus, the 3 and the 3 plus. Not the 3 plus is about the edge of what I'd recommend for a car that's gonna be more of a daily driver kind of set up. The 3 plus, again, is what I went with because I wanted the power handling. But it'll be the strongest of all the clutches that they offer. Now as far you wondering about the time, installation on something like this, this is a tough one to gauge. When we did it on a lift, we had all the right tools. In theory, if you have everything at your discretion, including the lift, I would say it's probably maybe a six hour installation. But if you're doing it at home, give yourself, I'd say, 6 to 10 hours, for sure, to actually get the installation finished.

But, as I said, just make sure you take your time. Bleed it properly. Break the clutch in. You'll be back on the road in no time.