Premium is down to ~$3.90 already.
stan.distortion said:
calab said:
Catalytic converter thefts are on the rise, do the newer 2010+ vehicles require them in order to run or is it more to do with air quality controls the government pushes upon the vehicle owner to get tested to pass.
Mechanically they only remove carbon monoxide from exhaust gasses and can be replaced by a length of pipe in pretty much all cases. It would be possible to prevent that in the ECU programming, anything outside the correct range of values causes an error or shutdown. I've not heard of any manufacturers doing that but it wouldn't surprise me, it's a simple change and wouldn't cost anything.
Not to join in the beatdown stan, but you should know
Cat's basically are a necessity because car engines burn fuel at such high temperatures, and will always be burning small amounts of oil within the piston proper. Stan- the cat's purpose is to act as a sort of "secondary heat reactor", where the catalysts (i.e. a metal or material that makes chemical reactions occur more vigorously) make hydrocarbons burn harder and faster. We need these at high temps, because the two major health-damaging tailpipe emissions- Nitrous Oxide and Carbon Monoxide- form easily within an engine. Make a motor too hot, you get tons of NOx in exchange for no CO. Make it a little cool? CO instead. Problem tho, is CO can't really be burned, only can have heat and more oxygen added to hopefully make CO2 at super high temps; but NOx CAN, so the cat uses exhaust gases to heat up to the point where these reactions occur.
You cat is running like, 800F in some small areas and those two gasses really decide what temps engines work at. On top of that, your piston rings constantly need a thin coating of oil to work right, so you're always burning small quantities of oil- leading to more NOx and crap in the tailpipe. Ever wonder why a car without an exhaust smells like gas all the time? It's because without that cat, those unburned- or partially burned- hydrocarbons buildup and leak out steadily. Without a cat to burn them off, you smell like you have a fuel leak all the time.
As for calab, I think most cars now need cats just to run with modern ECUs, since most ECUs work off of testing their own exhaust emissions as data to see if something has failed in the engine. Even my '87 MR2 would check engine me with no Cat in place.
neptronix said:
War is going to get increasingly difficult to wage among big nations as the economy becomes increasingly globalized and interconnected.
It will also become increasingly expensive to wage.
Which... I suppose is a great thing all told, but it carries a lot of spooky connotations towards whom has power and "controls" things.
speedmd said:
Another econo box disrupter to hit the roads this year. Target is Sub 10K $$. I want one. Lumin "Corn"!
I looked him up but I didn't find anything. What is this little guy?
I never understood chemistry but the heating alone from a simple box on a pipe is pretty fxing mindblowing and then there's fuel cells... platinum must be amazing stuff to a chemist! The number of cats I've seen thrown out in the junk over the years... one day landfills will be a valuable resource :/ Backpressure does bugger all for power btw, good for silencing and the cat might like it but resonance does most of the work (hence why Yamaha have always been good at tuning). Pressure changes density and that effects the speed of sound in a gas.
