DO YOU HAVE INSPECTIONS WHERE YOU ARE AT. I LIVE IN FLORIDA AND WE DONT SO I WENT AHEAD AND COMPLETELY CUT THE CAT OUT. I HAD A ENGINE LIGHT COME ON ONCE BUT I CLEARDED IT AND IT HAS RAN FINE. SO IDLE PROBLEMS NOTHING. I COULD FEEL THE POWER DIFFERENCE AND SOUND. IT COST ME 100 DOLLARS FOR THEM TO CUT IT OUT AND PUT A YPIPE IN. IT EVEN LOOKS NICE TOO. HOPE THIS WILL HELP.

ROBERT
FROM FLORIDA
98 RAM 5.2

 

That's an operation you have to do yourself here in PA. The last time a my mechanic gutted a cat was for one of my dads cars back in like 1990. Now the environmentalists are all up there *** about it, and the shop can catch a pretty big fine for doing that.

 

Yeah they can also recieve a huge fine for throwing their catalytic converter away too.

 

take your truck to your local muffler shop and they would be able to fab you up a custom Y-pipe, that way u can mount your universal cat at the end of it..

kind of a jankey way if u want to keep the stock headers..

im getting my longtubes and offroad Y then just welding a high-flow or race universal to the end of the Y..

 

calvin, what year is your truck?

you may or you may not be benefitted from removing the cat depending on year

96+ you should not remove cat because dowstream 02 sensor is going to set a code for cat effiency and make you have some problems with gas milage and performace. OBD-II

unless you wire up a SIM

95 and below OBD-I
REMOVE IT!! lol
not really - gut it

but make sure that you are staying within your states inpection policies... best thing to do if it is a 95 and below is to just gut it out and leave the empty box up for looks, if you are caught without one of some sort in most states, you can be fined like thousands of dollars and have your truck impounded until you pay to have a Cat replaced on the truck - Virginia

 

On some of the early OBD II vehicles you can still get away with removing/gutting your cat with no check engine/MIL light. 96-97 for sure maybe 98-99.
Emissions get tighter as the vehicles get newer.
Assuming you don't have CAL emission standard

 

Bouncer88, I know! Its so damn retarded to have it done this way.
ONECRAZYJEEP, I live in Miami and we don’t have inspections either I think the whole state doesn’t. I had wanted to gutt it but after reading some people saying it may not be a good option I kind of don’t want to mess anything up by causing a code to come up.
XXL 1500, 1996 L a friend of mine says he knows a muffler shop that will gutt my cat for about $100 or so. He has a 93 Chevy impala true duals with 2 cats but both are gutted incase he gets stopped. He seems to have no problems but I don’t know if his car is OBD-I or OBD-II.

one question is how can I gut the cat myself? i think i was reading somewhere to stick a pipe in there and smash it up but there has to be a better way of doing this. I mean what if a piece that i didn’t hit gets broken off and then that’s what causes my muffler to clog or something...lol

i do plan to install headers but right now I’m just doing a tune up and fixing what’s wrong. so i just need a quick fix that’s cheap lol

thank you guys for the help again,
Calvin

 

yeah, you just take like a construction spike - big metal rod with point at one end and shove that b*tch up in there and break it all up and smash everything inside and then start it up and blow it out - you prob wont get all out at first but u can, it is just time consuming

just repeat until all pieces are out
i know someone that cut the side of his cat open and got it out that way - but you can tell it has been tampered with - BAD-ticket

try and run it with it gutted and see what happens - see if it throws a code

 

oh yeah forgot to say that make sure you have your exhaust removed as close to the back of the cat as possible so you dont clog ur muffler - cut it and re-weld after ur done

 

i didnt get this last part... when i cut the pipe im cutting between the muffler and cat. then i stick the pipe in the muffler and smash everything. start the engine and let it run (while its not connected to the muffler). smash again, run again,smash again,run again. next step is to connect the pipes again but i wasnt going to weld(being that i dont know how) i was going to get a pipe connector. actually the reason i was gonna do that was because i wanted later to get the gibson super truck exhuast and it also has a pipe connector(no welding). is that ok?