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Old 11-26-2011, 12:23 AM   #119
MarylandSpeed
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Drives: 2012 ZL1 & 2010 2SS/RS
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Maryland
Posts: 3,378
First off, I think this gets a bit blown out of proportion in that in terms of warranty claims, there has been nothing unusual with the Camaro as far as Kooks cats. I have seen 3-4 fail in several hundred sold..and pretty much every one of them was supercharged. The bottom line is a supercharger adds a bunch of heat to the exhaust equation if not properly tuned. If you run a supercharged set up with cats, it has to be tuned almost perfectly once it gets over 600 HP. When I say that, I mean that a properly tuned supercharged car will have exhaust gas temps similar to stock. However a improperly tuned car will have exhaust gas temps hot enough to make the manifolds glow. In general cats do not just fail..there has to be a cause..and normally the issue is the tune. The problem is, tuning is is a black science most people do not understand. There also multiple ways when tuning to accomplish the same thing. I recently saw a tune someone paid $600 for from a supposedly reputable tuner that took supposedly a day to do. When compared to the stock tune, less than 10 tables were played with, and the VE table was not touched. The car ran okay, but it had a very lazy tune in it that was not all it could be or worth $600 in labor. Whenever a cat fails, I tell people to have their tune checked because the cat failure is an effect of a cause. However then most people argue their tuner is gods gift to tuners, and blame the cat.

Also I want to stress cat failures are not limited to Kooks. They are rare to begin with, but we have them with every manufacturer's headers we sell.

In my personal experiance, I have a GTO and a Camaro both supercharged at that 600 HP level, and I have never had a cat failure..mine look fine. However my tunes have also been absolutly dialed in.
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