It was located there by design. Chevy 3/4 and 1 tons with the 454 had the catalyst behind the muffler for a few years. The late 80’s-early 90’s engine ran dirty enough that under load the catalysts would overheat and melt down. They needed to be further back from the engine to stay alive.
Now cars have the catalyst integrated into the manifold…
When I change the oil in my engine, the engine doesn’t care where the old oil goes. I can dispose of it at an oil recycler or I can dump it in the storm drain in the street in front of my house. The engine doesn’t care.
When the exhaust leaves the engine, the engine doesn’t care where it goes. It can go through a catalyst or it can go out into the air I breathe. The engine doesn’t care.
@Buckedzulu If you are in the USA altering the emmisions equipment will get you a large fine . Also effect the air that people breath which is why you should not do that.
If you really want a Turbo just buy a vehicle that already has it installed by the factory.
Interesting that quest for better mpg resulted in smaller displacement motors that use turbos and folks realized that replacing wimpy turbos with big turbos makes more power. No one used them in big cubes days.
It seems to me that the farther away from the intake manifold the turbo is, the greater the pressure loss. Distance and additional tube bends would reduce efficiency.
With turbo chargers 10 feet from the engine, it would take a moment to fill those long pipes with air pressure, I wonder if that was understood before the project began.
This is a nice direct path to the intake manifold, the first few years did not have an intercooler.
An engine makes power by moving air & fuel through it, the more air & fuel it can move the more power it can possibly make, so for a given cubic inch engine, the better the induction side and better flowing/less restrictive exhaust side, the more power the engine is capable of making, to a point, everything has to work together…
But everything has a seesaw effect, removing the Cat, resonator, muffler, and or whatever, the more emissions it is producing, or more correct the less emissions it is controlling…
You just have to be careful. Too little backpressure is also no good, it causes too much exhaust scavenging and results in less volumetric efficiency. Pulse charging is important aspect of engine design…
