Trying to figure out what's wrong w/ my car i decided to remove the stock cat completely (in case its clogging). Simply went out and bought a pipe from autozone. All i have to say after i removed it is WOW!! I fired up the car when i had the cat cut out but hadn't hooked up the rest of the exhaust yet, so it was open from the manifold.... I then installed the straight pipe and fired it up again and it sounds almost as loud, but a little 'cleaner'. Surprisingly w/ the flowmaster on the back (not sure which series) it actually sounds great (hooker fan myself).

I highly suggest cutting out the cat to anyone who doesn't have inspection tests... makes the car sound 10x as 'ballsy' and cost less than $15.
One suggestion tho is to make sure you have a reciprocating saw or something similar to make cutting the exhaust much quicker - - dad thought it'd be funny to remind me that we had one after i had spent almost 10 minutes hacking at the pipe :\

Anyways i highly suggest this to anyone w/ $15 and an hour or so to spare on a boring weekend.

 

I gained .5 in the 1/4 by gutting mine. (Had a problem welding the straight pipes in, so I just gutted them.)

 

more power

 

.5??? Either is was clogged or something, cause just removing a cat won't gain you 1/2second in the 1/4.

I'd like to see how my car would sound without a cat, but I failed emissions 4 times before I got my cat and cat-back so I just want to leave it on there at least till I go thru again.

 

You're right. One was clogged.

 

mine musta been clogged cuz i went from zero low end torque to lots more when i removed it

 

You young kids should've been around when we had to deal with those terrible pellet-bed convertors back in the 70's! Even those low-compression smoggers woke up when those things were removed!

 

Getting rid of the Cat results in NO actual gains, only in your
imagination.:lala: :lala:

 

I have a good imagination... It even warps the time clocks at the track. I probably would have still gained .2 in the 1/4 after gutting em if they weren't clogged.

 

Yeah, my imagination was good enough for my friend to notice the difference riding in it with out me telling them. Plus I like the sound.

 

I didn't really feel a difference, I must have a numb ***. But numbers don't lie.

The only seat of the pants difference I've ever felt from a mod (so far) was when I ported my plenum and cleaned the 2mm layer of crap off my IAT sensor. It runs 100% smoother now and has awesome power when passing.

And yes, I love the gutted cat sound.

 

Yeah, those cats had plugs on the bottom that you could just pull off and let the crap out of the inside - making 'gutting' them much much easier and you could always buy more pellets and refill the converter for emissions testing time.

 

Are you serios? they may have made performance suck, but if they were that easy to gut and were refillable that would make life a lot easier on some people(I dont have to worry about it though).

 

Yeah, the problem with those types of cats is that they were marginal at best for actually reducing harmful emissions. That's why they have gone the way of the dinosaur. The honeycomb design is much better at exposing the catalyst to the exhaust gasses and doing its job.

They would have one or more holes in the bottom of them that the factory would cap off with a metal plug. You could pull that plug off and replace it with a bolt on version of the plug or you would need a special tool that would press on a plug like the factory had on there. They had those into the early to mid 80s on some vehicles as well..... My 85 S10 2.8L 5-speed has a pellet-bed cat on it...

Another downside to these cats is that those plugs were made out of some crappy pot-metal and they would rot out sooner than the rest of the cat would. So that would create a huge exhaust leak and exhaust shops would rape their customers and tell them that they needed an entire new catalytic converter when the existing one could likely be repaired for under $50 (converters all ran well over $200 back then).....