A blasted cat

I’ve now had a chance to have a look at the cat rather harder. Of course, this involves actually cutting up my nice new Tony Law exhaust system which is a bit alarming. Here it is in the vice just as  I set about it with a hacksaw.

You can see the lambda boss sitting here. When I took the lambda sensor out it was completely black, symptomatic, I guess, of the thing running incredibly rich and dumping carbon all over everything.

After a few minutes with a hacksaw I cut off, in their entirety, the headers (as you can see, the secondaries are one with the exhaust system. With the front off this is what it’s like looking into the internals of the cat. It looks completely shattered in there. I suspect that what’s happened is the the whole thing’s melted internally and the resulting blockage has just meant that the air flow has pummelled the thing so much that a good deal of it’s broken off and been blown out the back of the exhaust.

With that done I cut the other end off as well. I then realised that with my favourite large screwdriver (useless as a screwdriver, ace as a chisel and a big lever) I managed to completely extricate the cat matrix from the housing.

The matrix, or what’s  left of it, looks like this. This is looking from the rearward end of the matrix and you can just about see what was intended to be the cat’s structure. The front end is much more bashed up, presumably as a result of airflow. (Or, more likely, unburnt fuel flow.)

I’ve been thinking what to do about this, in between complete fury at the utter, utter, stupidity of the authorities insisting we do this. After all, Honda presumably  engineered the cat installation on the latest Fireblade (I think it’s got one) with the aid of a large development budget. As it is, we RGB people are trying to do the same thing for peanuts, although my share of the peanuts is probably in excess of £1000, for which I’ve so far scored zero championship points.

Oh well, I suppose I should also comment that I have done a few other bits and pieces. Most significantly, I have finally done what I’ve been meaning to do for a long time and refitted all the diff bolts with high-strength threadlock and also lockwired all the bolts. If that doesn’t keep them in position, then I’ve no idea what will. I do now own a pair of proper lockwire pliers, they’re quite fun, I shall probably lockwire all sorts of things from now on.

Problem is, drilling 1.5mm holes in nuts and bolts is quite the best way of breaking drill bits that I have yet come across.