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OK, heres a strange one. 2005 caddy 5 speed, pre facelift with external slave clutch cylinder.

Always been a bit of a pain as the clutch bite point was right at the floor and if you kept your foot on the clutch you couldn't get any gears until you released and reapplied the pedal. Drove like this for a year until last week when suddenly the clutch hit the floor and no amount of pumping would get the clutch to work again. Ahh, Master cylinder has finally gone, no problem. new one has been sat in the van, I'll have a go at fitting it.

Too many hours later and finally fitted and decided to replace the slave cylinder as lines were empty of fluid, so what the heck.

Anyways ..... Cheap chinesium slave cylinder fitted and could I heck get the tosser to bleed properly. eventually put it down to a shitty plastic bleed nipple and bad quality control and ended up putting the original slave cylinder back in with the rubber boot and plastic rod end from the new one.

The spend far too many days trying to get a pedal back. Tried bleeding, then a vacuum bleed and then a pressure bleed. To the point I had .5l of Dot 4 flowing thu without a single air bubble,but still no pedal.

Current situation.

Slave cylinder out of gearbox and pedal is super hard as rod is already fully extended.... makes sence right?
Push plunger in by hand and pedal will again push the rod, pushing it out ... yup, just as expected.
Bolt the slave cylinder in ..... Pedal hits the floor, stays there and no clutch.
unbolt ... everything seems fine, rebolt the slave and does exactly the same.

Its driving me mental ...... anyone care to give their opinions ?

Are you sure the clutch that's installed is the correct one for your van?

It does sound like the seals have gone in the slave cylinder - one good way to bleed a slave is to connect a tube between brake caliper nipple and clutch slave nipple, open both nipples, open the reservoir and press the brake pedal down smoothly, not too hard, and keep an eye on reservoir level, the brake pressure will reverse bleed the clutch slave, and if they share a reservoir then no over filling happens. But the air gets pushed out backwards under pressure, back to the reservoir. Doesn't take much brake presses to do this. One or two.

This was a great tip I got on the Merc forums when I converted an A class from semi auto (clutchless manual) to clutch pedal manual, it was a b*st*rd to bleed and that trick worked instantly.

Sounds like the pressure plate or thrust bearing has given up, if you have full travel on the slave and fully extended when fitted definitely sounds like a bearing , plate or the end of the thrust arm broken so it’s pivoting on the bearing instead or pushing the bearing into the pressure plate and not taking the pressure off the clutch plate