Check your cats...
 

And I don't mean the kind that meow. I have a whipple w/kooks headers & high flow cats. Well I've been working 12-hour days so haven't had any time to work on my car but I started to notice some exhaust leaks and the motor was feeling a bit "flat" I finally took a look at the cats and they were destroyed. I didn't take pics, but the centers were detached from the housing and a lot of it was melted...not pretty. I think the general consensus is not to run cats w/higher hp motors anyway, but just throwing this out there as an FYI.

This is NO JOKE GUYS! Anyone who is blown needs to seriously take a look at the cats... I'll get someone that knows more to comment in here...

:popcorn:

shaner... how hot is your whipple getting? I have a buddy w/o cats and the whipple is cool to the touch after driving and a buddy with cats whose whipple is so hot you can see the heat coming off the hood and it burnt the hood liner. Only difference is the cats.

Look for a post from 2L82RUN... he has a good bit of knowledge about this. He was telling me...


and to quote the immortal words of Dan Kasky.... "Cats are for pussies" :sm0:

We gutted my cats a few weeks ago to avoid future problems. I am sure the Vengeance guys have been saying that they have seen a lot of cat issues on FI cars as of late.

I am fortunate to live in a state with no visual and no emissions inspections so I just gutted mine, you may want to remove and replace with a test pipe so you can re-install at test time.

I don't claim to be an expert but in talking to my tuner last this subject came up during our conversation. We were talking about FI motors, specifically the LS3, and how durable they have been. He told me they only recently had a supercharged LS3 come back in with problems with the #6 cylinder. When they got into it they found customers cats caused the issue. Customer was running 'hi-flow' cats with a supercharger. What happened and is occurring with other FI cars running cats is the supercharger/turbo is pushing so much exhaust that the bottleneck becomes the cats. This is causing the cats to heat up more than on a NA motor. The substrate inside the cats is expanding so much due to the heat that it is breaking down and then getting pushed, or in at least one case that my tuner saw - spun/twisted, into the cat and tries to actually push the material out of the cats. As you can imagine the material then clogs up the HI-FLOW cats causing all the heat to back up into the cylinders/motor causing some bad mojo to occur. My tuner is of the opinion that if you are running a FI setup that you need to remove the cats. His opinion of HI-FLOW cats is that they don't flow as well as the manufacturers claim. That being said, they will work fine on a NA engine, but definitely not built for FI applications. Fortunately I live in a state where they don't 'sniff' test. I just have a slip piece in my exhaust in case I would ever have to put the cats back on for any reason. I have a set of brand new HI-FLOW cats in the garage but don't plan on using them unless I would sell the car.
Like I stated earlier, I'm not an expert on this but just relaying what I learned last week. It makes sense to me that if the cat material is breaking down and plugging up then the heat absolutely has no where to go but back into the engine. I talked to Shardik2ss about this. He has a Whipple and its running so hot it burned his hood liner!! He is running cats and is supposed to get them checked. I'm waiting to see what he finds out as well.

I had to gut my cats after 1 mo with the supercharger. completely destroyed its a must do for all of ya.

If y'all are interested I have pics of sc corvette that has blown out the cats. But it's best to just take their word for it. Hi flow Cats and boost don't mix

what cats?

I running an E-Force with exhaust manifolds and stock front cats with the rear cats removed. Has anyone encountered problems with the stock cats and FI? Considering the vast majority of people are using LT headers and Hi Flow cats, I would hazard a guess that the stock cats probably have not come into question yet.

Not cool. Shouldn't the HF cats hold up regardless? Could this be busting motors from blowback into cylinders smashing valves against pistons?
I'm going to have mine checked for sure.
Exhaust manufactures should be hearing this as most people are doing HF cats with exhaust upgrades and then SC's. If CATS aren't holding up, and most places require emissions test, then it only makes sense that cats are buiilt with better materials to hold up to the heat. Perhaps, real iron instead of melting inexpensive billet aluminum, eh?

It's not just the heat it is also the pressure from the supercharger..

Shouldn't matter; A quality CAT should not melt, here's an article I found on the subject. Hope this helps. I don't expect mine to melt, if it does me an the manufacturer going to have a deep conversation on the topic.

I might be old fashioned but if a corporation manufactures, tests, and sells aftermarket automotive products those products should hold up to what their supposed to do.

Doesn't make any sense to me that cats melt, when you need them to pass emissions.

I might be missing something here, but most cars are used for daily drivers, and many vehicles have superchargers and turbos' straight from the automaker. So, putting my ignorance aside, seems like snake oil to me when cats start to melt and the exuse is you have a supercharger on your engine. No? :iono:

Personally, if it were me, I wouldn't be destrying my cats, instead I'd be looking for a pro-bono replacement pair.

http://www.importtuner.com/tech/impp...ers/index.html

I know for some the term pay to play comes to mind, but I don't mind paying to play, but I shouldn't be paying and then being told to break the products I just bought so they won't break my engine.