ennui wrote:How does one go about checking/cleaning a cat? Does it have to be taken to a muffler shop? or are there ways of doing it yourself?
You can check to see if the cat still has the stuff still in it. If you want to check to see how efficient it still is then you need to find a shop with a emissions reading machine and they can tell you how well its running. The one that I had was running about 0.72% conversion of HC to CO2, a healthy working cat should be converting HC at about 6+%. So if the muffler shop has an emissions machine then your set. If you just wanna see if your cat is still there then take it off and look at it.