Robert,

You did wear a mask whilst pounding out the cat... right?

Nasty stuff in a catalytic converter.  Not good to breath.

The "few" times that I've performed this procedure, I always wear a
mask and run water inside the cat while pounding out the chunks.

Cheers,

Jeff

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 10:51 PM, Robert Fisher<refisher@mchsi.com> wrote:
> I was having some weird, intermittent symptoms which were complicated by
> other issues, but it turned out that at least part of my hot running issue
> and most of my low power issue was caused by a clogged cat. In my cat there
> were, or appeared to be, two formed pieces of 'honeycomb', one at each end.
> They were both intact, but one of them had come loose and was travelling
> around in the cat. Sometimes the van would run normally, and sometimes it
> would run (using the term loosely) like hell. Apparently it would sometimes
> land in such a way that most of the exhaust would pass normally and other
> times it would block the pipe. I couldn't figure out any way to secure the
> thing in place and I didn't have time to try anyway, so I wound up pounding
> the stuff out. I could see from some of the larger chunks that survived that
> it was getting occluded anyway, but I think it would have had some fair
> amount of life left in it had it not broken loose like that... it kind of
> chapped my ass to have to bust it up prematurely, as it were.
>
> I told my wife that driving a 22 year old vehicle after having it sit up
> like it did meant 'driving out the problems'- in other words we were going
> to have a period of many failures large and small until we cleared out most
> of the weak points, and so here we are.
>
> Now I have to try to figure out if my idle control is really dead or if it's
> a connection issue.
>
>
>
> This van is costing me a lot of Wilderbucks lately. : (
>
>
>
> Ah well- at least I have enough seatbelts going now for the carpool kids.
>
>
>
> Cya,
>
> Robert
>