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Termyn8or -> RE: Police investigating rash of auto parts thefts, cat converter (7/30/2010 8:28:44 AM)
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Hunky, I don't mean to be too snarky here, but if you were the town crier the British would have wiped us out before you brushed your teeth in the morning.
The guy I just threw the fuck outta here made alot of money doing that. I wouldn't let him do it anymore, but all it took was a hacksaw and transportation. Just drive up to a used car lot and start cutting for $500 a day. Almost enough to support a crack habit.
For years in this town they have required a scrap licence, which has your picture on it, to take anything in for recycling. People still did it. After while, now when one person shows up which a bunch of catalytic convertors they start asking questions, scrap license or not. You better work for a junkyard or something, seriously.
However my ex buddy does, at least until I decide to cost him his job. He fucked me over at a very bad time and I know where he works, and he has not yet felt the wrath of the Terminator. I am seriously considering having a talk with his boss, who I have already met. He might as well "book state", for the uninitiated that means to leave the state because of the trouble you are in. But that's a different issue.
The family pickup truck was bought sans a convertor, and my ex buddy stole it off the guy we bought it from, that was a few years ago. We had nothing to do with it but it was nice to get the truck for less because of it.
But the last cat I bought new was only $46. Apparently they have already solved the problem by figuring out how to do the job without platinum. But I have seen lists that give the scrap prices for cats, some are hundreds of dollars. The ones from expensive, foreign high performance cars pay the best. From the average shitcan you might get ten bucks. But if you have a trunkload of them, you can do fairly well.
You see the fact that they got cheaper now for a bunch of cars does not automatically remove the platinum fron the older convertors.
And there are a couple of things about those cats that few people know. It is illegal to bypass the cat on a car so equipped. Certain cars and trucks from the early 1970s got an exemption, mainly the ones with the more powerful engines. Also there was, up util more recently no way to test a cat. If your engine ran really right it did not need one. Manufacturing tolerances and such got sloppy and a cat was needed for those engines that would run, but not quite right.
Now they purposely "detune" the engine via the ECM and there is usually a second O2 sensor after the cat to detect whether it is functioning or not. But the fact is, if the engine actually does run perfectly, you don't need it at all. They just can't guarantee that on every production car, so ergo, on goes the cat.
One more thing, as I have said I come from a family of car people. I can smell the exhaust of a car and know if it will pass emissions testing. The only thing trips me up now is NO2, nitrous oxide. And if you can really smell that catalysed exhaust smell out of the tailpipe, your engine is running too rich or misfiring.
But that's the thing, now they all do because that hot and dirty exhaust is what fires the thing up and makes it work.
T
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