So i had a guy at school trying to get me to remove my cadillac converter to add "HP" but he didnt tell me wat bad it would do..anyone wanna enlighten me on this? i have no expeirience with that part of my car...the only thing i kno is that there is a expensive 02 sensor back there and when the 02 sensor on my header went bad my car ran like crap..and my gas milage went wayyyyyy down
My bad Catalytic converter..lol
Well.. if you "gut" the cat, or remove it entirely.. say, replace it with a test pipe.. you get a bit less resistance from the free-flowing exhaust gases that performance enthusiasts strive for (You want good exhaust velocity... to encourage scavenging of the cylinders during the exhaust stroke... but that's getting deep...). You don't want so-called "back pressure", which is a myth anyways.. but that's another, much longer, much deeper, story.
What you'll get.. on an OBD2 car.. is a check engine light because you have no working catalytic converter... which will throw a code, usually P0420 for cat inefficiency... which basically is... the car thinks the cat isn't working (which it isn't, because it's not there) and the pre-cat sensor sees the same readings as the post-cat one does. The only real way around it.. is to somehow disable the secondary O2 sensor.. or fool it into getting a valid reading. There are O2 simulators out there, but in my experience they don't work very well.
The other issue you run into.. is if you ever have to go for a vehicle inspection or emissions test. Since you have no cat, you'd fail on that alone - it's illegal everywhere to remove emissions equipment. You may actually face some stiff fines depending on who finds out. (I have never heard of anyone getting caught.. but another story... yeah.. I digress..)
Performance wise? Unless you've got some hell of an engine.. you probably wouldn't notice the difference. The restriction is pretty minimal, unless your cat is plugged or blocked somehow.. which would be an entirely different story. Then your car would barely run...
so basically not even worth the trouble cause a 2.2 ohv is no where close to "hell of a motor"..lol and you would have to deal with a annoying light
Listen to the Lenko. He speaks the truth. Very informative post Lenko
Cavaliers didn't come with big V8's... which would be "a hell of a motor".
i agree, it was very helpful and well spoken.....maybe sticky worthy
lenko- u said you had bad luck with 02 sims... care to elaborate?
Sure thing.. when I put the L67 into the 'vert, I didn't have a spot in the pipe for a rear O2 sensor (cat was too close to the flange). So I had to make the missing O2 code go away so I could pass emissions and get my car on the road..
I bought a GM O2 sim from o2simulator.com, plugged it in... got the red LED on indicating it's working... and nothing, code kept coming up P0420.. no good. I tried two others, one off Ebay for $50 or so and another from Casper Electronics... no dice. Couldn't get rid of the code.
Then I used Powrtuner to just delete the P0420 code from the PCM... worked like a charm
I still have no rear O2 sensor... will put one in when I go to the 3" cat-back exhaust. But I do have a cat.. so I passed the visual inspection on emissions.
damn that blows... i was really hoping mine would work.
How about the spark arrester mod to get rid of the p0420 code?
