Then again your chances are so low and spending nearly $300 alone for part and an additional amount for labor seems like it would be better to simply lower your deductible or acquire theft insurance on your vehicle.
I figure my time is coming to deal with this bull. The cat under my diesel truck is huge. If an automobile cat is worth $100 scrap, one the size of the one under my Dodge is bound to be worth 2 or 3 times that.
It would take about 2 minutes to cut one off with a battery powered sawzall.
I have about had it with our court system and it’s handling of this bs. Recently we caught a copper thief at our gun range red handed. He had broken into the well house to steal the 6 feet of copper wire that runs from the control box to the hole. Someone had done the same thing previously 4 months prior and did more damage to the door, lock and control box than they could possibly have gotten out of 6 feet of wire for scrap. At any rate, this time the local PD had their range qualifications scheduled for that day and when they got to the range, they caught him red handed in the act. Since they were out of their jurisdiction, they called the county sheriff’s department to pick up the heathen. The Deputy took the individual home after believing some bs story that he was just walking home and happened onto the gun range and thought it would be a good idea to break 8 concrete blocks out of the side of the well house so he could get inside and warm up. After the Sheriff got calls from about 30 of the 499 members of this club they did arrest him. He was turned loose within a couple of days. 2 months later, the same individual was caught when he set fire to a coal truck bed while attempting to cut the tailgate off the truck to steal it for scrap aluminum. Again, he was out the next day.
I’ll say this, if that is the way our government intends on handling these sorts of thieves, then they need not expect me to spend the $1300 I understand it costs to put a Catalytic converter back on my truck when or if it happens. Because I will not do it.
This kind of crap can be stopped. They should prosecute the scrap dealers for buying this stuff, after all, they are buying stolen property and that is a crime. Metal around here is disappearing at a tremendous rate. Things like disc harrows are walking off of farms and being sold for scrap. Air conditioning units off of houses, businesses, and even more than one local church.
Our government has decided it’s not worth the effort to prosecute and punish these criminals, and if that’s the case, they might as well decide in the same breath that I’m not going to worry about an unnecessary part on my truck that disappears because of their inability to do the job they were elected and charged with doing.
Skip
Supposedly Toyota converters are the hottest on the theft market right now and worth quite a bit because of the liberal use of precious metals like Cadium. New ones are very expensive.
In regard to performance the aftermarket cats DO NOT perform as well on many of the newer vehicles because they do not caontain that precious metals that actually react with the exhaust. For $100 what do you expect though. Relying on a simple burn-off effect on a traditional honeycomb converter doesn’t pass mustard on modern vehicles sometimes.
They’ve abandoned the active sniff test in many places and instead rely entirely on the OBDII scan results for compliance. As long as the downstream O2 sensor doesn’t trip a code, who’s to know? There is no way I would spring that kind of cash for an OEM converter unless it prevented me from passing the state inspection…