Do u need to take roof off spider to change clutch?

Check that it's not the seals , we have done dozens of these repairs and it should cost more that $700 for labor and seals, I have never had to change a valve yet. You don't remove the roof to do a clutch

 

Don't early spiders need top removed for access to subframe bolts? Not sure about your year though.Why exactly were you having dealer look at car? Were you getting CEL's?

 

No you don't need to remove the roof exept on really early spiders. Nor to access the rollover valves. In reality, the whole unit doesn't need removal in its entirety, you can remove the fixings and lift the roof cassette a couple of inches with an engine crane to access rollover valves and frame bolts. If it has the early white valves they snap at the point where the pipe attaches due to the pipe being too short. Updated valves are orange and are fitted with a revised pipe.

 

Does the engine light come straight back when codes are cleared? Evap leaks only flag an error when the motronic carrys out the evap test, early cars used vacuum and later used pressure. If its an evap leak the light takes a while to come on. A simple way to detect leakage is give the car a run and have a sniff around the front of the engine bay covers. Fuel odour under these conditions is quite prominent if there's an issue. If its an oxygen sensor it usually comes back quickly, the heating elements within the component are the normal failure. MAF's are slightly harder to diagnose, as unless it's totally shot it very often won't flag an actual MAF related error, instead the fuel trim tries to compensate until the upper limit of the parameter is reached and it flags it as a long term fuel trim error. Use of an oscilloscope to measure the signal voltage from the MAF will quickly establish a fault. An intake manifold leak should also be checked for. All of these things are fairly basic to diagnose, and any half decent shop with an SD2 should detect any of them fairly quickly.
This is all, of course, based on your posts, and Internet diagnosis is difficult without seeing the SD2 logs.

 

I've had very similar circumstances and maybe able to offer some suggestions, shoot me back a PM !

 

I have a 2001 Spider, and had to remove the top mechanism to access the cradle to remove the transmission.

Not difficult, but requires an engine hoist or forklift as previously mentioned.

 

Any reader should work. You probably need campaign 148, fixes a missing ground signal in the OBD port. You can find it with a quick search. And yes, an SD will read without that pin but others won't.