Caught one of my cats red hot yesterday after about an hour of driving. So leads me to believe its clogged.

Im gonna slice it out this weekend with a sawza. Question is what do I put in its place. Pipe? or keep cat just gut it and reattach using hose clamps?

plan is either way to cut it out, use thin sheet metal I have to cut 1.5" wide strips. use strips to bend around cuts. and hose clamp it.

thanks yall. and its the first cat too. not blowin 60+ bucks to replace it. also itll sound better with the flowmaster anyway

 

Pipe.
i've got a strait pipe all the way in mine. right to the muffler.

 

Before you cut anything , get the codes in the PCM read.
If the truck is running too rich it will cause a cat to over heat.
Rangers use high flow cats so if it plugged you must have an engine problem.

 

its running rich as nuts. due to fact that EGR valve is shot, so is unplugged, causeing numerous codes (half true, half off target) to be fixed with money I dont have. So for the time being itll have to run rich and my cat and the 6 inches of pipe in front of it will blistering red. or else I swap it out

 

So long as you don't live in an area where there's emission testing, don't care about being able to sell it to someone in an area that has it and will wisely look at that when shopping (ie, diminished resale value), and don't care about the lower gas mileage because it's running rich, I'd probably replace it with a piece of pipe.

*You may wish to fix the inexpensive to service EGR system yourself, then determine exactly why it's running rich, then make a decision on removing the cat. The cost of fixing the rich condition yourself and leaving the cat alone may more than pay for the extra gas you're burning. For fun, maybe pull a plug on each side and see how they look. Running rich carbons up plugs, carbon is a conductor and weakens spark, this lowers power and gas mileage. The latter two items = less fun and less beer money.

 

i gutted mine, looks like its still there, mines old enough to only have a sensor before the cat, so nothings affected by its destruction. no pollution testing here and as far as resale, im not the original owner, so it be pretty hard to prove i did it. plus i'll probly drive it till theres nothing left.

 

The majority of your posts lack any common sense.

 

the majority of youre posts consist of being rude, or generally negative.

how is this lacking? problem with truck, cat is red hot, usually means cat is not letting exhaust through easily correct? (rhetorical, obviously yes that usually what that means when the cat is red, not all the pipe before it) so when this occurs do you go spend 70$ on new cat or trash it (again rhetorical, if you live in a place with no smog test, you scrap it). never done this before so asked what to replace it with pipe or gutted cat? legitimate question. "if you have nothing nice to say, dont say it at all." youre and admin, thought this was expected from yall? info where im wrong about the truck is welcome, pointless derogatory comments are more than welcome to stay in your head

I have zero money, so without money (unless parts are now free...which they arent) I cannot fix issues with truck. only thing I can do is drive her less. So for now removing the cat will help. not fix. but help. and ill take that.

 

thanks for info. I did replace all spark less than 6 months ago so thats ok (I hope) Im really just trying to make truck last through college or until I get a small beater car and keep the ranger in storage. I get 15-16mpg and ill admit i stomp on it to just listen to it, I dont go fast just sound nice, so i burn hella more gas than I need to but even then 18 aint that great if i drove it nice.

 

Usually a cat overheats because it's working harder than it was ever designed to for a prolonged amount of time, and this happens because it's running too rich for wayyy too long. The cat is trying to burn unburnt fuel, it's receiving an unusually high amount, and it's action is in overdrive. Yours is not the first time I've heard of a cat glowing red, and I've seen them glowing red. Wayyy back in 1975 when they first started putting them on cars, a few people got them so hot due to malfunctions (rich) that they'd burn a car. Auto manufacturers got a bit more careful after that. The reason I asked about the plug condition was in search for an answer to the question of, just how black and sooty are they. This could give an idea/indicator as to just how overly rich it's running. It wouldn't directly give an answer.

Personally, if it were mine I'd first find the reason for the EGR problem and fix it, clear codes, drive, then find out what code comes up next and try to diagnose why it's running rich, if for no other reason than to know why. Not every cause for running rich has a high dollar fix, but right now it's not probably not possible to try to diagnose the rich issue due to the known EGR issue.

What's wrong with the EGR system, is it the valve itself, is it not sealing, is it sticking or is the diaphragm leaking? Dirty and not sealing means you may be able to save it with some oven cleaner, the good chit with lye in it and not that whimpy, no smell stuff. Of course, this running rich may have contributed to all this dirt, if that's the case then there's two problems to fix.

 

The reason the above posts are saying get codes and make sure it is indeed a clogged cat is because the catalyst in the converter gets hot to in essence complete the burn of the exhaust fumes. If you're running rich, you're adding on fuel to the heat which creates more heat.

But, if you going to remove it, just supplement a piece of pipe in.