Howdy,

Cleaned out precats with seafoam and 2 bottles of heet, unfortunately the cat material built up inside the flex pipe mesh and wound up blocking the exhaust on the way to work yesterday. Considering how tight the precat fits, really not sure why you need 6 nuts and two bolts. To pull it yesterday. had to use most of my 235 lbs to get it out. I am over 6' with a 33 waist, it isn't fat weight . Even funnier that my boss expected me to go to work with no exhaust attached before the cat instead of the auto parts store to get a new flex pipe which of course was longer than the stock one. Downright amazing how well the car ran without cats, O2 sensors or exhaust of any kind before the big catalytic converter.

Another question: would a bad coil pack or wire cause the exhaust to sound a bit like a Fisher Price lawnmower upon acceleration? Getting all 6 of both hopefully on Monday.

Thank you much in advance for any input.

 

no but misfiring and an exhaust that is leaking would

 

TYVM, got a random misfire code, wasn't sure if it was that or partially clogged cat. Everything past the cat looks fairly recent, no rust at least and didn't see any holes in the cat or precat when I pulled them yesterday other than the holes for the O2 sensors, car actually seemed to run better with no exhaust pipes coming from the engine.

 

If you have crud plugging the y-pipe flex section, it is probably also plugging up the main cat. It sounds as if one of your pre-cats has self destructed and that is the stuff plugging up things.

 

Main cat is just a shell now, it got plugged earlier, I was just wondering why there was wire mesh on the inside of the factory flex tube, the crud probably would have flown right out if it wasn't for the mesh. The crud is flaky stuff. Thank goodness I don't have to do emissions testing.