The tab on one of my catalytic converters broke - - both cats bolt to the boomerang style brace that bolts to the chassis for support (I guess). I had this rattle at 2750 rpm that sounded terrible, but I found the culprit last night - - I just unbolted the broken tab from the brace and removed it.

I'm wondering if I'm going to have any problems before I get around to getting the tab welded back on???

Do the test pipes that are on the market mount to the brace???

Thanks in advance for your input.

 

I drove around for several thousand miles without one of my aftermarket cats being bolted to that support because it didn't line up and I guess it wasn't important enough for the shop that installed them to drill a new whole in the cat brace to make it secure. The only downside of this is that more of the weight of the cat and front end of the exhaust is hanging from your header on that side. I wouldn't do it for too long, but you're fine for the short term.

 

Anybody know about the test pipes??

 

Some come with a bracket to bolt it to and some don't. I know the Helix products don't come with them. I have been running without it for awhile, and as long as you have plenty of clearance on the cats, then you should be fine. It think the brace is only there to make sure the cats don't hit the heat shields.

 

There was a discussion on this here recently. The general consensus was that the support bracket is only needed on the stock cats because they are so tremendously heavy. The aftermarket cats and test pipes are *much* lighter, so they don't need the bracket. My Kinetix cats did not have the bracket, and I don't believe their test pipes do either.

If your cats are aftermarket, then it's probably not a problem. If you're using the heavy stock cats, though, then you might want to get that support fixed asap.

 

While I agree that the aftermarket cats are lighter the other IMPORTANT reason for this bracket is the reduction of vibration and tension on the headers. Without the bracket, the length of pipe that is free to resonate, stress and bounce due to road vibration, etc is much longer than with the bracket.