Cars & Luck -
I brought my Miata into the garage to work on it today and I actually learned something new! I'm one of the very lucky people who own a Miata that was originally sold in California. Okay, what exactly does this mean? I have two catalytic converters.
It seems I always tend to get very lucky with my cars. All the bolts on my truck ended up being seized, my Miata has two catalytic converters. What I also learned today is that you can't just easily unbolt the pre-cat and take it out in less than an hour. You have to unbolt the exhaust manifold from the engine block, unbolt the cat from the downpipe, wrestle the conjoined twins out of the engine bay, then FINALLY remove the cat from the headers.
Well this basically means I have two options to prevent my CEL from coming back on. I can buy a new pre-cat and continue to suffer from this apparantley flawed exhaust system, or buy new headers and relocate my O2 sensors. I guess the stock exhaust header for the pre-cat model is considered a "boat anchor". I always love hearing that my slow car could have been slightly less slow for the past three years. I could also go with an alternatively very cheap solution: gut the pre-cat, essestially converting it to a plain pipe. The only problem with this is that my CEL will continue to spook me by remaining lit. I personally would like to have the CEL off so I can actually see when this car decides to throw another fit and turn the CEL back on. I guess I could also gut the pre-cat and relocate my O2 sensors?
I made a post to the forums to make sure my pre-cat is the issue before I go through all these hoops to take it out. I'll probably just delete the pre-cat and upgrade to some decent flowing headers. I'll have to take it into a shop for them to weld a new spot for my downstream O2 sensor, but I'm sure it will be worth it.