I am currently looking at purchasing a 2000 S2000 with 84,000 miles. The car is in beautiful condition and has always been garage kept.

Drives perfectly too, except for one thing. When you are slowing down and leave the car in the same gear (don't touch the clutch), the gearbox/shifter rattles pretty loudly. The car shifts fine and nothing else seems to be wrong, but I was curious as to if this was something normal or not.

If it's not, do you guys think its anything serious, or just something that needs to be tightened up?

I know it's hard to diagnose something like that in a setting like this, but I couldn't get ahold of my mechanic, so I thought I would try you guys. I am not very mechanically inclined at all, but if you need any more info, I'll do my best to answer your questions.

Thanks in advance.

 

Okay, so after doing a little more research on my own, it seems this was an issue with early S2000's and Honda issued a recall/whatever it's called for it.

I'm not too concerned with it right now, but I would probably eventually want to get it fixed. Would I basically have to change out the entire clutch in order to fix the problem?

If so, how much money are we talking about?

Like I said, I'm not too worried about it right now, so I've got time to save up if need be.

 

hang about a tick - there was a recall for clutch buzz. This is a buzzing noise on acceleration and deceleration, no vibration/noise from the gearbox though.

The car has 84,000 miles or 134,000 km on the clock. Is it still on the original clutch?? Most clutches seem to go anywhere between 70,000 and 100,000 kms.

It could be the clutch; in which case this is about $2,000 AUD to replace here in aust. If it is not the clutch this could be accident damage or gearbox issue. Gearbox rebuild will set you back in the region of $2500-3000+ AUD depending on the issue.

When are you getting the problem; i.e what gear, speeds? is it when you are decelerating from the top of a gear or when you are decelerating gently say in 3rd gear coming up to some lights??

worst case scenario would be new clutch (which you will have to change at some point on any car) and gearbox rebuild i guess. Some vibration can be caused by a bent tailshaft although this is on acceleration, and CV joints can also cause vibration on acceleration load.

You say the car drives fine accelerating? Does it have the issue when you are decelerating everytime or intermittently?