can you take the cats off a lightning is it good are bad

 

The stock midpipes have 4 cats. It's a good idea to replace them with Bassani or Magnaflow Mid Pipes with 2 Hi-Flow Race Cats. If you remove them all, you'll lose the much needed low and mid range power due to loss of backpressure in the exhaust. Off Road Pipes (no cats) are used best at High RPM's.

 

one more thing...
if you remove all your cats, you will have to either have the rear O2's turned off via chip or get MIL eliminators.

 

I gutted my cats and had the o2 sensors turned off. I lost a little low end torque, but gained a good amount of high end power. I made 492 ft lbs with just a 4# lower, efan, psp tune, and jlp airbox.

 

Got cats taken off..

A little less low end I believe but more power.

However it was tooooooo loud. I could barely hear the blower whine if I didn't floor it.

Installed high-flow magnaflow cats.... Perfect sound, and great performance. Very decent but louder than with the stock cats.

I can hear the whine again at partial throttle.

 

I kept the stock mid pipes, with main cats in place, but had the front pup cats cut off and replaced with straight pipe. Straight pipe is better for exhaust flow than hollowed out or gutted cats. It is louder than with 4 cats, and I don't feel any loss of low end torque or gain of top end power (I don't feel you can really feel a gain/loss of 10 or less hp anyway). It does seem to rev a little faster and has a little "burble" in the sound that it didn't have before. I like it.

 

I'm a big fan of Random Tech converters. They're the best high hp ones on the market. Check out their website and you'll see they specialize in cats for blown and turbocharged cars. They're expensive, but worth it. I'm making the switch as soon as I can afford it.

 

I was thinking of doing the same... just not sure about the sound, but its cheap enough to try I guess.

 

I have the Random tech cats in my custom 3" stainless twin side exit system and they are fantastic. These are full metal cats so there is no ceramic to worry about. These cats are virtually indestructible. The other stuff out there is really cheap. I did allot of research but it paid off.

TB