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Brian@BMVK

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Some of you who know me personally may have seen this already, but wanted to share something in order to maybe help some of you proactively.

On Jan 10th, I had just started a drive to get some coffee when I noticed a very odd behavior from my clutch pedal. It was getting stopped about halfway down the travel and would only go all the way down if I pushed the pedal inboard and down simultaneously. After I kind of limped home carefully, I inspected the pedal, and found that it would move laterally about 2.5-3" and that there were obvious cracks at the pedal pivot. I ordered a replacement set of pedals. I replaced them just over a week later, which is a truly AWFUL job.

Here are my findings about the pedal after removing the old one:

1. Due to how drastically different the pedal feel, engagement smoothness became after the replacement, I can say that my original pedal had failed at some level more than 2 years ago. This was just the final catastrophic break. The cracked pivot/bad weld created a less consistent pedal that did not actually translate all the foot motion into clutch MC depression. It happened so slowly over time that I did not notice it progressively worsening, much like a frog in boiling water.

2. This is bad design engineering. The pivot only had 90 deg (of 360) welded on either side, and on mine, this was a clearly bad weld that had poor penetration into the base metal. What this shows is not just a bad weld, but a design incapable of being robust to manufacturing variability. A design that had the weld 360 deg around or even 180 deg around would likely have had enough margin by design to prevent this type of failure. Once the weld let go, it shifted more load to the other side, cracking the other weld.

3. Ford did this to save a few cents on a pedal. Anyone who's spent time working at/with Ford knows how much of their cars are supplier-led design, with the responsible component engineers nodding like bobbing heads. This example represents a total failure of the dFMEA process that is used in automotive product development to ensure quality and safety. A few cents per car was saved on a part that is critical and required for operation of the vehicle. That is not an acceptable decision.

4. I'm definitely not the only one. In my local area, I've been able to find 3 other people with similar failures. The catastrophic failure occurred at 90k miles. The cold weld likely broke at something like 65k miles. It's hard to know for sure. A friend of mine had his failure at 40k miles.

Pictures below.



20210118_165903.jpg


20210118_165839.jpg
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sjmurphy34

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Nice writeup, sucks this happened to you. Definitely does look like a cheap design which could have been improved for not much increase in price.

Curious, do you run the stock clutch pedal spring, or did you remove it or replace with the steeda one? Wondering if different springs would maybe lead to increased wear or not.
 
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Brian@BMVK

Brian@BMVK

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Nice writeup, sucks this happened to you. Definitely does look like a cheap design which could have been improved for not much increase in price.

Curious, do you run the stock clutch pedal spring, or did you remove it or replace with the steeda one? Wondering if different springs would maybe lead to increased wear or not.
I've had the steeda one for most of the life of the car. I'll do a FBD, but I'm pretty sure the tensile/compressive loads on the pedal pivot do not change with a lighter assist spring/no spring. It just increases the driver input effort to push in the plunger, but the total force to push in the plunger is identical.

And yeah, on a part like this, once the part is in the welding setup, it's not much more to have it go that much further. The bulk of the cost is just in the tooling jig.
 

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Some of you who know me personally may have seen this already, but wanted to share something in order to maybe help some of you proactively.

On Jan 10th, I had just started a drive to get some coffee when I noticed a very odd behavior from my clutch pedal. It was getting stopped about halfway down the travel and would only go all the way down if I pushed the pedal inboard and down simultaneously. After I kind of limped home carefully, I inspected the pedal, and found that it would move laterally about 2.5-3" and that there were obvious cracks at the pedal pivot. I ordered a replacement set of pedals. I replaced them just over a week later, which is a truly AWFUL job.

Here are my findings about the pedal after removing the old one:

1. Due to how drastically different the pedal feel, engagement smoothness became after the replacement, I can say that my original pedal had failed at some level more than 2 years ago. This was just the final catastrophic break. The cracked pivot/bad weld created a less consistent pedal that did not actually translate all the foot motion into clutch MC depression. It happened so slowly over time that I did not notice it progressively worsening, much like a frog in boiling water.

2. This is bad design engineering. The pivot only had 90 deg (of 360) welded on either side, and on mine, this was a clearly bad weld that had poor penetration into the base metal. What this shows is not just a bad weld, but a design incapable of being robust to manufacturing variability. A design that had the weld 360 deg around or even 180 deg around would likely have had enough margin by design to prevent this type of failure. Once the weld let go, it shifted more load to the other side, cracking the other weld.

3. Ford did this to save a few cents on a pedal. Anyone who's spent time working at/with Ford knows how much of their cars are supplier-led design, with the responsible component engineers nodding like bobbing heads. This example represents a total failure of the dFMEA process that is used in automotive product development to ensure quality and safety. A few cents per car was saved on a part that is critical and required for operation of the vehicle. That is not an acceptable decision.

4. I'm definitely not the only one. In my local area, I've been able to find 3 other people with similar failures. The catastrophic failure occurred at 90k miles. The cold weld likely broke at something like 65k miles. It's hard to know for sure. A friend of mine had his failure at 40k miles.

Pictures below.



20210118_165903.jpg


20210118_165839.jpg
Thanks for this heads-up.

As you mentioned, I (like some others) have seen the whole assembly out of the car before, and have seen what it is made out of, and the welds (or lack of) and it's just so disappointing to see cost-cutting measure after cost-cutting measure.

I came from the Nissan world prior to buying a Mustang, in my Altima SE-R, similar problems with those clutch pedal brackets, except it was all cheap folded and spot welded sheet metal brackets, where after some time, the brackets just broke in weak spots, and spot welds came off in other spots.
I took mine out, threw it out (cuz the whole thing was just bent out of whack, so I wanted to start fresh) bought a new one, and had my friend's chassis shop reinforce the whole damn thing with additional metal in the corner and weld the damn thing shut.

Even other Nissans like the S14s, NISMO actually sold clutch bracket reinforcements lol. Such cost-cutting BS.

My buddy a used 2017 GT Cali Special a year ago, and month in, his pedal was squeaking. Guess what it turned out to be?

I, like some others, would be happy to pay a little more for quality out the gate, and am not in the camp of expecting quality and not having to pay for it.
 
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Brian@BMVK

Brian@BMVK

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Thanks for this heads-up.

As you mentioned, I (like some others) have seen the whole assembly out of the car before, and have seen what it is made out of, and the welds (or lack of) and it's just so disappointing to see cost-cutting measure after cost-cutting measure.

I came from the Nissan world prior to buying a Mustang, in my Altima SE-R, similar problems with those clutch pedal brackets, except it was all cheap folded and spot welded sheet metal brackets, where after some time, the brackets just broke in weak spots, and spot welds came off in other spots.
I took mine out, threw it out (cuz the whole thing was just bent out of whack, so I wanted to start fresh) bought a new one, and had my friend's chassis shop reinforce the whole damn thing with additional metal in the corner and weld the damn thing shut.

Even other Nissans like the S14s, NISMO actually sold clutch bracket reinforcements lol. Such cost-cutting BS.

My buddy a used 2017 GT Cali Special a year ago, and month in, his pedal was squeaking. Guess what it turned out to be?

I, like some others, would be happy to pay a little more for quality out the gate, and am not in the camp of expecting quality and not having to pay for it.
Mine was also squeaking for quite a long time. It did not sound like a cracked metal squeak, rather than just the pivot. Turns out it was the crack propagating with every cycle.

I do understand and agree with cost reduction in spots that are not critical. Cost reduction like this on parts that are for basic vehicle function is inexcusable.
 

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In this case, it's not a design issue, but a stupid cost decision not to weld it better. And same thing with the MT82 forks; they only have 4 freaking tack welds, and I think those are the 'updated' ones on 2019+ cars, like mine. Decisions that compromise quality are counterproductive in the long run, but unfortunately, that's what happens with public companies; all are driven by profits. That's their #1, #2, and #3 priority. As long as the part fail after warranty expires, it's all good in their eyes.
 
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Brian@BMVK

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In this case, it's not a design issue, but a stupid cost decision not to weld it better. And same thing with the MT82 forks; they only have 4 freaking tack welds, and I think those are the 'updated' ones on 2019+ cars, like mine. Decisions that compromise quality are counterproductive in the long run, but unfortunately, that's what happens with public companies; all are driven by profits. That's their #1, #2, and #3 priority. As long as the part fail after warranty expires, it's all good in their eyes.
The amount of welding is a design decision. The amount of welding directly influences the design margin the part has to less-than-perfect welding.
 

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Here are my findings about the pedal after removing the old one:

1. Due to how drastically different the pedal feel, engagement smoothness became after the replacement, I can say that my original pedal had failed at some level more than 2 years ago. This was just the final catastrophic break. The cracked pivot/bad weld created a less consistent pedal that did not actually translate all the foot motion into clutch MC depression. It happened so slowly over time that I did not notice it progressively worsening, much like a frog in boiling water.

2. This is bad design engineering. The pivot only had 90 deg (of 360) welded on either side, and on mine, this was a clearly bad weld that had poor penetration into the base metal. What this shows is not just a bad weld, but a design incapable of being robust to manufacturing variability. A design that had the weld 360 deg around or even 180 deg around would likely have had enough margin by design to prevent this type of failure. Once the weld let go, it shifted more load to the other side, cracking the other weld.

3. Ford did this to save a few cents on a pedal. Anyone who's spent time working at/with Ford knows how much of their cars are supplier-led design, with the responsible component engineers nodding like bobbing heads. This example represents a total failure of the dFMEA process that is used in automotive product development to ensure quality and safety. A few cents per car was saved on a part that is critical and required for operation of the vehicle. That is not an acceptable decision.

4. I'm definitely not the only one. In my local area, I've been able to find 3 other people with similar failures. The catastrophic failure occurred at 90k miles. The cold weld likely broke at something like 65k miles. It's hard to know for sure. A friend of mine had his failure at 40k miles.
Do you know if the replacement you got is new-ish (2018+)? It has the same small (~90 degrees?) of weld as your original 2015 assembly?

Wondering how much of a pain it would be for an amateur to take it out and to a shop to reinforce the welds before putting it back in. With my luck it'd otherwise break a few weeks after warranty is up.
 

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Brian@BMVK

Brian@BMVK

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Do you know if the replacement you got is new-ish (2018+)? It has the same small (~90 degrees?) of weld as your original 2015 assembly?

Wondering how much of a pain it would be for an amateur to take it out and to a shop to reinforce the welds before putting it back in. With my luck it'd otherwise break a few weeks after warranty is up.
My replacement is from a 15-17. I don't believe the 2018+ had a change for the pedals but I really do not know for sure.

Removing the assembly is really bad and would cost a lot in labor.
 
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It appears there's an updated service part pedal assembly, but I can't tell from pictures if they made any improvement to this. I was told a while back they changed the clutch assist spring rate for 2018+ but don't know for sure.
2018+ service part number is JR3Z-2455-A.
 

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It appears there's an updated service part pedal assembly, but I can't tell from pictures if they made any improvement to this. I was told a while back they changed the clutch assist spring rate for 2018+ but don't know for sure.
2018+ service part number is JR3Z-2455-A.
Ah, thanks for checking. Maybe they reduced the weld to 45 degrees in the updated service part to save another half cent.

Googled a bit and saw there is another thread with the same issue described (https://www.mustang6g.com/forums/threads/clutch-brake-pedal-assembly-removal.104338/post-2256219), though it's also seems to involve 2015-2017 models only, though that is perhaps just because as you say it takes a while for it to brake.

Something to keep any eye out for then. Perhaps there will be some opportunity to remove the assembly easier when doing other work some day.
 
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Brian@BMVK

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Ah, thanks for checking. Maybe they reduced the weld to 45 degrees in the updated service part to save another half cent.

Googled a bit and saw there is another thread with the same issue described (https://www.mustang6g.com/forums/threads/clutch-brake-pedal-assembly-removal.104338/post-2256219), though it's also seems to involve 2015-2017 models only, though that is perhaps just because as you say it takes a while for it to brake.

Something to keep any eye out for then. Perhaps there will be some opportunity to remove the assembly easier when doing other work some day.
He's a friend/former coworker of mine and the first person I called when I found it broke for real. :crackup:
 

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Brian,
Thanks for sharing this...seriously valuable contribution to all of us owners.

The amount of welding is a design decision. The amount of welding directly influences the design margin the part has to less-than-perfect welding.
I agree with this but it seems like the weld points/amount of welding is part of the design but there is a big difference between quality welds and poor welds. I understand that skilled machinists and welders are in short supply these days, at least in the USA...not sure where these are coming from but it could be operator skill problem or a process problem. Just speculating.

Ford has been designing pedal assemblies for a century. It's hard to imagine the design could be that far off.
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