possible clutch gone bad?

[DevilGirl]

I searched the forum trying to figure out what's going on with my car. But I'm not exactly sure what I read fits my issues. So here goes:

I last fueled on Saturday, with about 1/8-1/4 tank remaining.

The car sat in the driveway after coming home from fueling on Saturday until Monday morning when I went to work.

It was a rainy morning and I was running my defroster (like I have on many many many other mornings in the 3+ years I've owned this car).

It ran fine for the first 10 miles or so. Leaving from a stoplight, 1st gear felt fine, but 2nd, 3rd, and 4th each revv'ed the RPMs really high (high 3k into low 4k range), and the car was very slow going. There was a slight hill, but I was on the flat before the hill even started when I left the traffic light.

By the time I got to the top of that small hill, there was a definite burning smell evident (like burnt rubber, what I've come to associate with the clutch on other occassions of hill starts and high revvs).

I did pull over and let the car sit for a moment while I tried to figure out what to do (mind you, this was about 5:20am).

I did continue to work, and it happened a few more times. On the way home, it initially did it, but once I had the windows cleared of fog, I turned the defroster off and it was fine.


Since then it has been intermitent as to when it will act like this, whether the defrost is on or not.


My initial thoughts were that I had a bad batch of gas (not the most reputable gas station, being that it's a grocery store chain gas station, but when you have $0.90 off per gallon of gas, you get what you can get sometimes).

My next thought was perhaps the sparkplugs need replacing (almost 92k and havn't been replaced yet).

I was then thinking maybe it was the defrost being on. So I experimented with that idea and determined that is not the direct cause, but perhaps a contributing factor.

So now I'm thinking that perhaps my clutch is going. What it felt like is if the clutch was at least partial engaged while attempting acceleration. However, the clutch was already let out and it was doing this.

So.... Bad clutch? Thoughts?