Anyone know any tricks to remove the catalytic converter from a B5? I cut the exhaust before the flex pipe, took out the air box and disconnected the front flange. The rear flange is hard to get too and there's not enough room to pull it out with the pipe on their. I'm thinking about cutting the cat in half or something. Anyone have experience with this job?

 

yes... a lot of cussing, 2 broken ratchets and half a dozen bud light is what i went through lol....

ur gonna need a long extension and some swivel sockets... i just bought a swivel adapter and switched around the proper sizes as necessary... best of luck with it... took me a few hours to put in my test pipe

ooh and obviously u will need to jack the car up and get diry underneath lol

 

Thanks for the reply. I spent 15 min on the bolts on the back flange to no avail so I took the easy way out and cut the cat in half. Went through a few sawsal blades. Eventually I got it with a 12" blade towards the back of the cat. Hopefully my Ebay replacement cat wont throw a code it was only 120 bucks and direct bolt.

 

yea its not exactly easy... it took me about 15 minutes just to figure out an angle to actually get the ratchet on the bolt without fear of stripping it... and unless u had a wrench on the other side of the bolt all u were doing was spinning the whole thing... u gotta have something stopping the bolt from spinning on the other side so it will actualy loosen up...

good luck with the ebay part

 

Yes, awful horrible job, make sure you use a lot of copper anti-seize re-installing the bolts Just incase it ever has to come back apart.