So I've been running th RT cats with my Greddy TT for 5000 miles, and as you know, this kit runs at about 11:1 at WOT. I pulled the driver and passenger side cat when I changed wastegate gaskets, and guess what I found??

A perfect kitty. Looks good to me....no damage yet. Just thought I'd share since some folks have had these collapse on them. I still think it's an anomaly. With 100's or 100's of these cats sold, it's likely there will be a handful of defects.

Hth, GQ

 

I just pulled mine and checked them as well. We screwed up when we were testing a new toy for my car and ended up dumping raw fuel into the cats/exhaust. Guess I got lucky since they are still fine several hundred miles later.

 

A chicken!

 

yea, i recently pulled mine off after about 2k miles and they were almost perfectly intact.

 

What is that stuff made of in the inside? Is that paper?

 

Platinum most likely.

 

typically the internals are made of different metals that react together with the heat to filter the gas. they are pretty exotic...like rhodium, platinum, and vanadium.

thats why they are expensive.

 

typically the internals are made of different metals that react together with the heat to filter the gas. they are pretty exotic...like rhodium, platinum, and vanadium.

thats why they are expensive.

 

Uh, duh. That was a pretty dumb question.

Obviously it couldn't be paper with the heat that exists at the Cats.

Thanks for not ripping me a new one. That's got to be the stupidest thing I've ever posted on this forum. LOL!

 

hehe....

The platinum is the main catalyst that cuases the suckers to heat up to like 2000 degrees or something ridiculous like that. This extreme heat is how the cat actually cleans the exhaust. It literally vaporizes the unburned fuel and No2's leftover from combustion.

 

wow! you just got away with the paper response by the skin of your teeth!

 

Glad to hear there are some RT that are good. It seems that more and more RT owners are having issues with the driver side blowing out. I just saw another one from Failsafe in NorCal.

 

Platinum odesn't react with much of anything, kinda like gold. Where did you hear that platinum is reactive?

 

That was hilarious. You crack me up!

 

What are you talking about? Platinum is a common catalyst as is palladium in many chemical reactions. What do you think the electrodes are made of in fuel cells?

The material in the cats is platinitized ceramic/asbestos honeycomb stock. Some cats have 2 chambers above and below a perforated mesh area that contains platinum coated ceramic beads. These last longer and are not brittle like the honeycomb, but they flow about half per unit area. The reason hiflows are more delicate is because the honeycomb matrix is less dense (more open area). This also means there is less surface area to dissipate heat to the outer shell. So if you are running rich and put a heavy load on these, you run the risk of premature burnout.

 

http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/platinum.html

http://www.uni-ulm.de/aok/uhg/Pdffile/EPJD_9_1999_1.pdf

Just looked it up, I always thought platinum was not very reactive with anything sorry