Need a new Cat for my 2004 V6 4.0, thoughts?

[herseyb]

Hey All,


TL/DR: Need a new (complete) cat system, any advice on parts? any advice on figuring out why my old cat died?

Book:

I got stranded out in the boonies a little while back, no power on the highway. Limped along at 15 miles an hour to a service station, and they blamed my cat.

They wouldn't work on replacing it, and there was no way I could get towed home (middle of a long road trip) so they charged me an arm and a leg to cut it out and replaced it with a pipe and sent me on my way. Said there were three parts, one of them mostly warn off, one of them mostly clogged, and another basically all the way clogged.

Repair pal has a HUGE difference in cost estimate, with roughly $200 labor, and $500 to $2000 in parts. I guess for my truck there are up to 3 cats and sensors needed.

Soon I need to be able to pass emissions (and I do have a warning light) but I don't understand why the range in cost is so much.

Has anyone replaced their cat? What is needed to get the engine light to turn off? I don't want to go into a repair place blind because I moved to a new town and haven't found a trustworthy mechanic yet.

(Have found some people that wanted to charge me $200 because there was no rubber on my sway bar link, so I'm feeling burned about auto repair lately.)

My ranger has 160,000 miles on it, still runs great, just a touch of roughness idling every once in a while, but starts fine and runs smooth. Was it just time for the cat to wear out, or is there a way to figure out what was going wrong to keep the new one from burning out too?

I don't want to pay $2,500 a year in cats, even though I love my truck.

Thanks

 

[JerZDevil81]

Have they every been replaced before? I'm guessing not.

The grand thing about or rangers is that they have 3 (or 4!) cats. 2 precats in the Y pipe and then another 1 or 2 after depedning on your year. At Napa your looking at 675-700 JUST for those pipes (Y pipe and converter). Then if you plan on replacing muffler, intermediate pipe and tail pipe your looking at like another $200. And THEN installation.

They will also try to get you to buy o2 sensors most of the time. So after all that you are prob looking close to $1500+.

You can buy this stuff called Cataclean or Guaranteed to Pass for a few bucks. Never tried them, but shops use this crap all the time to pass emissions. Might by you some time until you can afford a new system.

Good luck!

 

[ab_slack]

You say $2000 a year in cats, does that mean you replaced them a year ago?

There are things that can be wrong with the engine that can cause the cat to clog up. If it took 160K miles for that to happen I don't know it is an issue. If something else wrong like the O2 sensor out of whack then you gonna want to fix that too.

Was your CEL on before your vehicle was put to its knees with a clogged cat? If it was it could have been telling you the cat was not working or something else wrong that caused your cat problems. And now it is surely telling you that your cat isn't working cause it is not there, or if they cut out an O2 sensor it would report that as bad.

Pull codes on it see what they say.

Generally speaking once you fix things the codes will clear.

It is always possible to reset them without fixing things but they will come back and for emissions testing (here in NJ they pretty much trust computer if it is OBD2) clearing it won't work cause it will report that it hasn't completed all self tests yet.

You can buy this stuff called Cataclean or Guaranteed to Pass for a few bucks. Never tried them, but shops use this crap all the time to pass emissions. Might by you some time until you can afford a new system.

I suspect the cat cleaner isn't' going to work if the cat been cut out. Nor the other stuff if there is no cat tho I believe the guaranteed to pass stuff is little more than injector cleaner or like seafoam helps burn out carbon deposits.

Another big thing, I am not sure if it is federal law, I think it is, but I know at least in some states if they see the emissions system, particularly removal of a cat ahs been performed that can be big fines.

Fix it before going for emissions testing.

 

[JerZDevil81]

Yea, this stuff won't work if the cats have been cut out. If the cats have been replaced once already recently, you probably have too rich of a fuel mixture which is burning off in the cats, creating excessive heat and thats what melts them.

Yes, NJ is OBDII testing unless its a car less than 25 years old but not OBDII yet. That cataclean crap is just a strong carbon deposit cleaner but aparently works well enough to pass OBDII testing.

 

[JerZDevil81]

All I know about federal guidelines is that they had to be covered for 8yrs/80000 miles by the manufacturer. After that, its up to the states to test per their standards/laws.