What's the 'pucking' deal? -Clutch setups in depth-

[SnakeyesTx]

I'm getting conflicting information and thought I'd ask here to see what you all thought as well.

The time will be coming soon when I'll have to replace the clutch in my 540. After 145,000 miles and a very annoying clutch delay valve, there's a good chance that the disc isn't going to hold out too much longer. The throwout bearing makes a little bit of noise on occasion and pretty soon I'll be wanting to make a road trip out to the 'Tail of the Dragon' with a couple friends and see who can post some good times.

In any event, when the time comes, I'd rather not go with the OEM clutch setup as a friend of mine shelled out close to 800 bucks for the set, and I've seen some good aftermarket performance ones go for half that. My biggest issue is puck vs. disc.

For the longest time, I've seen ad's, pictures, claims that the more pucks you have, the less aggressive the clutch behaves, and the less pucks, the harder the clutch is to live with on a daily driver basis. This is what I thought even up until today when I was looking at Clutchmasters Stage 4 kit which sounded like just the ticket for a replacement clutch-set. It was offered in both 4 or 6 puck setups, and even their picture said "6 puck - less agressive" "4 puck - more aggressive" right on it.

I asked a friend about this and as soon as I said 4 puck or 6 puck, he just stopped me and said "4 puck... 3 if you could find one and really want to go the puck route." Then he links me to a forum with lots of people discussing the same thing with similarly heavy Dodge Stealth's and Mitsubishi 3000GT's. Basically from that group, they were saying the more pucks, the heavier the clutch and how it behaves more like an "instant on/instant off" switch and there's almost no lee-way in between. Lots of take-off chatter, and miserable day-to-day driving characteristics.

Basically, what I'm looking for is something that's going to be able to eventually hold up to around 450hp/450ft.lbs, grip like there's no tomorrow, have a bit tighter action than the OEM setup and let me be mischievous on those occasions where the road warrants it. Also, when it came to the debate of aluminum/lightweight flywheels, their concensus was that for a 4000 pound car, you really do need the inertia OEM flywheels offer and that the lighter alternatives make it even less daily-drivable as you need to rev it a bit more to keep it going on take-off's.

What say you?

[Blitzkrieg Bob]

I dunno, I never liked pucks for street driving, they tend to be very binary.

The best one I had on the street was a dual diaphragm disk type.

Smooth, you could slip it when you needed to, but grabbed like G.I. Joe's Kung Fu grip.