Clutch clanking

[guitar guru]

When I disengage the clutch to get going from a stop, clanking noises (seemingly from the clutch) start up and the noises sometimes last until I switch to third gear. I think it's getting worse too. To top it off, while I was riding today, I tried to upshift and it went into neutral, so I upshifted again and it was ok. Then when I was riding in fifth gear, it just randomly popped into neutral again, but when I upshifted it went into sixth fine. I rode the rest of the way home without incident, but these noises and those neutral drops are making me nervous.

A friend suggested I might need a new clutch cable. There is also very little room from where the clutch is fully engaged to where the clutch lever loses tension. So it shifts right at the beginning of the pull. I only have to pull the clutch in like a centimeter before it disengages. When I look at where the cable goes into the clutch compartment, it has more travel area than it has tension, if that makes sense. In other words, it can engage more fully, but there is no tension for it to do so.

Thanks for any help, and I hope this isn't too confusing.

[guitar guru]

Come to think of it, the sound is actually kind of like rattling, as if something isn't meshing up right or something.