Well I should start a thread on my S2k. With every peice of bad news, theres good news, right? I still waiting on the good news to start, but here we go.

Bought the car in April of '12, had 53K miles, 2001, only aftermarket anything on the car was a Viper alarm. A S2000 has been my (reasonable) dream since I was pretty young.

The days after I bought it.



After a good wax job.



Here comes the bad news, Ive had the car for 7 months. About September or so, I was going through the car cleaning and found a receipt for major engine work. At 23,602 miles, owner takes car to Honda Dealer due to "car won't start". Techs description:
"Diagnosed and found engine was overtached and bent all 16 valves. Tech sent head to to machine shop to repair damage. Tech found cylinder 3 needed to be honed due to damage. Tech was able to remove 90% of scratches for cylinder. Tech reinstalled cylinder and road tested vehicle."

The total cost was $3300. That was upsetting, but the car seemed to run as designed. Until 4500 miles after I bought the car. Cruising 75 down the interstate, felt a stutter in the engine looked down and the car was losing power. I pressed the clutch, engine quit immediately.


The starter barely could turn the engine over, it was like the engine had came as close as you can to locking up without locking up. After a bunch of bullshit with the insurance company towing me home I get the car home for $350 out of my pocket. I was 120 miles from home.


I found to some time to start to tear into this thing and find the problem.
Step 1.
Remove the Valve cover.




Thats top end of the engine, parts of the cams are purple due to overheated, aluminum melted all over the cam towers. Complete destruction.

Step 2.
Remove oil pan. Note-Oil Changed 2 days before hand, very clean oil even afterwards.




The Bronze color is a mix of some sort of sludge and burnt metal, all in the bottom of the oil pan.

What the hell went wrong? Have you seen this before?



And Im at that point right now, S2K savings account: Activated.
Plans? Buying a new F20C soon, doing the swap out myself. Keeping the current engine and completely rebulding it, upgrading it for boost. This process will take several months and even years. But you have to start somewhere right?

 

Whoever did the work on your engine didn't put everything back together properly. I'm guessing some sort of oil starvation occurred, causing overheating, then lockup, then mechanical failure.

 

ouch. you buy this privately or from a dealer?

 

Yea, it was definently overheated, the top of the pistons, the piston walls, bottom end looks good, but when I pulled the oil pan off I could rub my finger across the crankshaft and I would have tiny metal shavings on my finger. I was thinking when it was serviced the tech that did the head work most likely didnt torque the cam towers in the right sequence, causing cracks. Overtime it got worse, causing massive failure.

I bought the car from a local dealer, it was his sons car. His son, Tony, is on this website I believe, all the S2K owners here in New Orleans know the guy. Everything looked, sounded, tasted good with the car.

 

And this was done at a Honda dealership? Uhh...did you try to work it with the dealership that did the service to see if they would pay for repairs? I presume it was bought as-is, but darn!

 

The cracked/melted cam towers were a result of oil starvation to the head.

All the goo/shavings in the oil pan are your rod/main bearings. It seems you spun multiple bearings and ground them into dust, which clogged the oil passage to the head (take apart your vtec selinoid and i bet the screen is clogged). Cams were starved of oil and melted the caps and some of them broke.

As far as the reason the bearing failed. I can only guess it was one of two things.

1. The kid who had it before who bent all 16 valves also did some damage to the bearings at the same time
2. The tech who put it back together did a poor job and or did not inspect the bearings.

 

I would recommend that you get a f22c. 04-05 engines are plug and play. F22c makes more torque, better power through out the whole rpm range and can be revved to 8500 with AP1 ecu no problemo! Good luck.

 

any chance for warranty or lemon law?

 

The dealer didnt offer a warrenty so no warranty and I thought about the lemon law, but the reciept of the first engine repair clearly states "due to overtacked". So user error, not the cars.

Someone just pointed out to me that AUTOZONE refurbishes engine. they have a completely rebuilt engine with a 3 year warrenty for $4500. Anyone seen or even heard of this? Much less has anyone had experience with an Autozone engine.

But what Ill prolly do is go towards the J's Racing AP1, $6000 built up to 300 HP NA. Ill have to do more research on that. Anyone have anything to chime in on about the J's Racing Engine.

 

A 2001 has been out of warranty since 2004. Lemon law does not apply to used cars. It's not AHM's problem. Over rev = bent valves = not warranty. The repair done was a patch at best.


"Tech was able to remove 90% of scratches for cylinder. Tech reinstalled cylinder and road tested vehicle."

That is still a scuffed bore and it should of had a short block replaced for it.