1993 Mitsubishi Eclipse Pedal floored, still only going 10m

There's a bit of a background to the story of this car. I was pretty adamant when my Husband decided to buy me a car, that I wanted a Mitsubishi Eclipse. Our budget of course, was limited. Long story short, we ended up buying the car from a guy who lived roughly 2 1/2 hours away. He says he is a mechanic, could be a lie. I don't know. We paid 1500 for it. We knew when we bought it that there was a Shim plate problem. We were assured by both the seller and my good friend (who is great with cars, especially DSM's) that the shim plate wouldn't have much of an effect on the ability of the car to move. It would just make noise.

It DOES make a lot of noise, for a while it only made the noise when the car was idle, but now it's a bit more frequent. Just to say - I've only owned the car for about 3 weeks.

We hadn't had much trouble with the car up until the past couple days. We noted that it would stall a lot backing out of the driveway. I think it also stalled once at a red light, let it be noted that we ALWAYS let the car warm up for a good 15 - 20 minutes before driving it. Occasionally, the car would refuse to start. We would have to coax her into starting by pushing the break pedal or slamming it into park really hard.

Clarification
When the car stalls, it ONLY stalls when it comes to a complete stop. That's when the engine quits. When it doesn't start back up, you can turn the key as far to the right as you want and the engine does nothing. It doesn't crank or make any noise. The power still flows. As the lights, wipers, and radio will come on, but the engine itself does not start.


All of these issues we disregarded as the car being old (17 years). The other night I went to drive it to the gas station. It stalled a couple times on the way out then started up fine. I noticed as I was driving that I had to push on the gas just a little bit more than usual to make it move. It felt like it was really reluctant to get going. I came upstairs and told my husband, and he said it was probably just cold.

I took it out last night, and the situation had grown MUCH worse. I could push the pedal all the way to the floor and the car wouldn't go over 10 miles an hour. If I took my foot completely off and re-applied pressure, I could get it to accelerate up to about 15 - 20 mph but it would slow back down. So I turned the car around and came home.

I've been told that a myriad of things could be wrong. From the shim plate being bent and hitting the flywheel, the gas filter being clogged, the tranny fluid being low, or a complete transmission fail. I'm REALLY hoping it's not the latter.

I want to narrow the problem down as much as possible, neither my husband or myself know much about cars, and we don't want to get walked all over by some mechanic looking to make a buck.

So if you could, I would love to hear your opinion, and also how much you think it might cost to fix the problem.

Oh, by the way. The shim plate that is messed up is between the motor and the transmission. If you're looking under the hood dead on you can see the tail end of the shim plate almost directly in the middle, just a little bit off to the left. That's the one causing the noise (or problems?). We already planned on getting this fixed, so we expected to have to pay for the labor of dropping the transmission. So if it is a transmission problem, we would have them fix both issues in one go. I'm not sure how much the going rate of labor for dropping a transmission is, though.

I ramble a lot, and I'm sorry about that. Looking forward to getting some answers.

- Lynne