Yea agree just go ahead and replace them

 

You guys will get a kick out of this. Dodge dealer wants $1100 a PIECE for the OEM cats....I laughed until he hung up...
The problem I am faced with now is that magnaflow doesnt make the one I need. They only carry the CC's up to 2006 and the closest universal is the 51766. My cats have an o2 sensor before the converter and in the middle of it.
I know I am navigating treacherous waters here....but could I theoretically take a standard cat, hollow out a small section in the middle, weld a bung to it and sink the o2's?
My other options are an ap exhaust high flow heavy load or a thunderbolt. The OEM looks exactly like the thunderbolt with the exception of the sensor placement. Can you think of any reason loading the O2 sensor immediately behind the cat wouldn't work the same as one thats mounted in the middle of it?

 

Im sure its the same in the middle or after dont see what difference it'd make inside or behind . Yea 1100 is effin crazy! Try a junkyard maybe!?

 

Now as a preface to this posting, let me say that my goal here wasnt to have a truck that souned like 100 angry gorillas beating their chests and screaming. My previous 2004 had a dynomax exhaust that I was VERY unhappy with. Not because of performance or the sound outside the truck, but because it was literally PAINFUL in the cab through the 1.8-2.5k rpm range. The pounding drone drove me to add another borla exhaust and two more resonators to the dynomax setup just to keep my ears intact. That being, my goal here was to create a system that is a straight through design that sounds like the OEM exhaust until you get up on the throttle.
So, armed with a design from which I borrowed liberally, shown here by Hemi Head, I began amassing my parts.
I bought mandrel bent precurved pipes from performance-curve.com. $169 free shipping. I got a full boar x muffler off ebay for $40 and two Borla XS pros for $80 each. The performance curve kit was pretty good. I'd give it an 8 out of 10, there was one akward bend that had to be modified to fit between the spare tire and the shock tower on the drivers side. But it did come with rolled and slashed cut 18" stainless tips. Big plus there. Later i added a magnaflow s bend to reposition one of the mufflers, $30. Miscellaneous couplers and an autozone pipe for extensions, $15.

The first order of business was to remove the OEM catback. With a lot of hammering, torching and cussing, I removed it only to be appalled by the stock Y pipe. Way to go chrysler, mash two pipes together and dont even bother to actually merge them by cutting out the middle....fail....
The next step was to remove that Y pipe and determine whether the cats were fouled or not. I cut the Y pipe off up to the left side Cat. I then actually removed the cat and inspected it. It looked pretty good, actually. I took it down to the master muffler shop and asked for a professional opinion. The gentleman there, using a maglite and his nose, told me that the cat looked perfectly ok. Sweet, saved me a couple hundo's there.
I went back home and rewelded the cat. I did notice that the right side pipe had a downward bend on it and I had to cut it off and add a piece to level it out.
From there I added the Full Boar X muffler, extensions, borlas, and final pipes. Dry fitting all this by my lonesome sucked. After several hours of flexing and spining the pipes, moving them around to find a good fit, I marked them all up with a sharpie, removed them from the truck and began welding it all up. I certainly dont expect to win any welding awards, but all-in-all, I thought it turned out pretty good. The pics show the full boar clamped in place. A few days after making these vids, I did go back in and raise one of the borlas about 3 inches up and 2 inches out to keep it from smacking the other and welded everything but the fullboar to the downpipes and cat. The result and sound are exactly what I had envisioned: Outside sounds like stock till you jump on the throttle, and the interior sounds only very very slightly non OEM. There is no drone, be it MDS or otherwise, at all. Perfect.
Next time you're in UT Hemi Head, steaks are on me!

Pics:
http://imgur.com/a/Rmgba

Vids:

 

Wow.....thats alot of exhaust stuff going on under your truck! Looks good, and thumbs up on doing it yourslf.

 

I hope you didn't pay very much for those NEW mufflers because from the video, it's quite obvious that those are well used mufflers

 

They're actually brand new. They're Super 10 equivalents not made by Flowmaster. The couple that created magnaflow divorced and the wife now makes a brand called VX they are same exact thing but different name and half the cost

 

Awesome on all your DIY stuff. Wish I had the time to do some stuff myself. Sounds good!

 

The truck sounds really good, but it's still hard for me to believe that those mufflers are new, dirt rust and all, compared to the rest of the system

 

What size pipes are you runnin back? I was thinking of doing a similar set up