It's been a crazy few days. I have ordered and reordered the slave cylinder four times now. It seems that every time I order what is listed as "in stock and ready to ship" it turns out to be a "we will charge your card and then look and see if our suppliers have it" scenario. That goes for Amazon, Ebay, Rockauto, Advance Auto...Still waiting on refunds from three of them after they cancelled my orders unilaterally.
I supposedly have the throwout bearing itself due for delivery tomorrow from rockauto but I ran into all sorts of issues getting a slave cylinder. Finally I reached out to a Viper parts specialist who recently commented on a posting on one of the Viper enthusiast websites that he sponsors. He said he had a couple of the original Mopar complete slave cylinder assemblies with bearing. (Chrysler current PN5037357 & original PN4642581) He pretty much bought up the last few units that were still available before they went obsolete years ago from Dodge. So he is shipping me the real deal factory part. It cost around $250 (bearing included) delivered.
The funny thing about the Viper parts guy (Bill Brobst)
http://www.viperpartsrack.com/index....te=common/home is that I met him at the First Viper Owner's invitational back in 1994. My newly-wedded wife and I went to this event in order to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. (my idea of coure). She even got a "good sport" award for attending from Dodge management. The award still hangs in the garage. :-)
Anyway, Bill said in his email
"It was actually HER that I remembered first!!"
I had to laugh at that comment. And then he sent me a link to the original Dodge video that they did to document the crazy event. The wife, the car, and I are featured in several sections of the video including at 32:20, 35:04 and 36:26.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGJk...vikPerformance