I went away for spring break, and when I got back, my car was giving me a bunch of trouble with shifting. Its a 1994 del Sol VTEC (B16A3), manual. The symptoms I've noticed:

* It's very hard shifting, almost like the synchros are gone. I can shift mostly okay as long as I'm going slower than ~30 MPH, but any faster and I have to rev-match pretty perfectly to avoid grinds. This holds for any gear I try to shift into at that speed.

* The clutch seems to chatter when I start moving, both in reverse and first gears.

* Occasionally, when I'm stopped in gear with the clutch out, the car will jerk, like I let the clutch in and then back out really quickly.

None of these happened before break. I thought that the hard shifting might be caused by bad tranny fluid. It's got "El Cheapo" 10w-30 in there right now, I have Honda MTF for it but I've been waiting until I can find an LS 5th to swap in to change the fluid. And the other symptoms wouldn't have anything to do with the fluid as far as I can tell.

Anyone have similar problems before?

 

sounds like your clutch to me i just changed one out in a 88 celica did the same thing till the springs on his disk shattered then he had no clutch.. just get a new clutch for it and you should be ok

 

same thing happened to me with the same exact car! Is yours red too cause that'd be kinda weird!

Anywho, i replaced the clutch, the slave and a part of the clutch hardline. My clutch had broken where the springs are which made them loose so i could not shift at all.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by DeadEnd9009 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">same thing happened to me with the same exact car! Is yours red too cause that'd be kinda weird!

Anywho, i replaced the clutch, the slave and a part of the clutch hardline. My clutch had broken where the springs are which made them loose so i could not shift at all.</TD></TR></TABLE>

Yup, its a Red sol.... weird.

I was hoping it wasn't the clutch... I just replaced the clutch on the 92 Accord I'm selling.... didn't want to do a Clutch job again so soon . Oh well, at least it'll give me a decent chance to install an LS 5th.

 

make it easier on yourself by taking out the intermediate shaft from the get go...took me 5 hrs to put it back on and 30 seconds after i had taken that thing off

Thats why next time i rip it apart again i'll be able to do it in no time.

 

not to say your clutch is not bad also. but make sure to check your mounts especially that rear one. A blown rear mount, would cause jerky movement, and hard shifting.

 

also make sure you have no leaks and have proper fluid level in the reservoir, before you start tearing everything apart.

 

Thanks for the pointers... I had a friend look at the car and he showed me that the clutch mc was leaking pretty bad. I didn't realize you had to look under the dash for that one... didn't see any leak from the firewall side so i though it was fine

Ordered, replaced, and it's shifting just fine again... hope I didn't take too much life off the clutch while it was borked.