It occurred to me to look underneath this lovely specimen...
....which I have parked at the garage (and is slowly biodegrading as it sits). And would you look at that, but there's a resonator underneath that is in decent shape -- probably the least rusty thing under there! Sawzall to the rescue! You can never have enough parts cars.
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Also, I discovered there are only 2 exhaust sections from the factory, not 3. I incorrectly assumed the muffler was on a separate little section, but it's attached to the resonator section.
Anyway, here's the situation:
Top: busted catalytic section, front half of busted resonator section.
Bottom: spare catalytic section (with burned out cat) from Firefly #1.
What the inside of a Firefly catalytic converter
should look like:
What the inside of my "spare parts" catalytic converter actually looks like... no catalyst! Take this as a warning, kids, not to ignore that Check Engine light.
So I cut the bad cat off the good pipes and the good cat off the bad pipes, tacked the good bits together, test fit under the car, broke the tack welds by accident
, re-tacked, then welded it all up.
Next tack/welding session will be the resonator section, probably on Tuesday. Taking tomorrow off to go play on the river with visiting family.