[alfa] Converter failure postmortum

["Bruce Giller" <bgiller@xxxxxxxxx>]

	Last week the discountconverter cat on my Spider left me stranded on
the DC Beltway in the morning rush hour.  I replaced it with the old OEM
unit that I kept for sentimental reasons.

	I opened up the cat. last Saturday with my trusty right-angle
grinder right across the middle.  The interior honeycomp seemed to be in two
parts.  On the front section (directly downstream from exhaust manifold)
there was a loose piece of honeycomb remaining; about a 3x3x4 inch cube.  On
rearward section, the honeycomb was all there and attached to the cat.
walls.  However all the holes in the honeycomb were plugged on the interior
side.  Looking into the pipe from the back, the honeycomb wasn't plugged but
you couldn't see thru it.  I used a punch to remove the attached honeycomb
and found insulating material between the honeycomb and the cat. walls.  

	No idea if this is typical or not since I'm not sure just how cats.
are assembled at the factory.  But my guess is that the front honeycomb
slowly disintegrated and filled the front of the back honeycomb section
until the process accelerated and clogged the rearward section completely.

	Does this sound like this could happen?

	Bruce

	'86 Spider
	'73 GTV
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