[alfa] Re: Catalysts

["Mark Manley" <warpomatic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 12:30:24 +0000, alfa-digest wrote:

>From: "Bruce Giller" <bgiller@domain.elided>
>Subject: [alfa] Converter failure postmortum
>
>	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
>
     Here's a good cutaway of a typical converter.

http://homepage.mac.com/yahman/gcuj/Resources/seethru_01.jpg


                                    Mark Manley
	
Tulsa,Ok
'84 GTV6
X1/9 x3
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