First of all, my sincerest apologies for reviving a dead horse for the sole purpose of beating it to death again.
There has been a lot of headers talk on the boards recently, and one common thing that the CA people bring up is how much it sucks that we can't really touch headers because of our emissions legislation.
I want to have this thread as a way to pool the thoughts of everyone here to solve this issue so that us CA can finally get rid of the crappy headers the car came with.
So here is what many of us in CA are after: we want to install catless headers on my ZHP.
The guidelines:
1. Without triggering a CEL on our car.
2. Without needing to tune our car to remove the CEL or post-cat monitoring. (most of us would like to Eurocharge, but they don't do this)
3. The car much still pass emissions inspections with one exception: the car can still fail a visual. This is not that big of an issue because I've never seen anyone visually inspect my car during smog.
4. The car must still pass a sniffer test. Even though these are technically being phased out in CA, many smog shops, like mine, still use them. Thus, we will have to use after market cats.
5. Use of wideband controllers or O2 sims is highly discouraged, but still an option. The reason I'd rather not use this is because O2 sims are usually reported not to work, and an LS-1 controller is pretty pricey, and only masks the problem (and would still fail a sniffer because we need cats regardless)
I really hope anyone that has any info can chime in here and see if we can figure this out. If you have any friends that might know, any guys you know in smog, crazy ex-girlfriend who was surprisingly good with cars, old grandfather who was a tank mechanic in WWII... anybody.
Here is my idea, and I want to so what you guys think:
What if, after installing headers, I added two 400 cell racing cats right when the headers ended? And I mean RIGHT after. Weld on the flanges that usually come up to the headers right onto the cats, and route the post-cat O2 sensors right after. This is only about 8 inches past their OEM location. You could also use defoulers to possibly get cleaner air coming up to the sensors to avoid a CEL, and 400 cell should technically pass emissions.
Only flaw I see here is that there are still reports of CELs because of the farther location of the O2 sensors.
Any input?
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Originally Posted by Hornung418
