gvns8

I was looking over my exhaust system and noticed that I have two California style mini Catylatic converters right at the manifold, and what looks like an additional cat converter right before the Flowmaster exhaust. Is this a normal setup, or did the previous owner do something dumb by having 3 cats?

Mini Cats look like this:



And here is my muffler and either a third cat or a silencer maybe?

JeepingDan

Looks normal to me.

NCMetalMechanic

the rear one is a resonator; its from the factory to work with the muffler to keep noise down. the resonator drops the pitch of the exhaust, and the muffler makes it softer.

gvns8

Thanks for the info, that makes a lot more sense. I feel like it might be worth removing this and replacing it with straight pipe to reduce the restriction and possibly give a little more power. Any thoughts?

NCMetalMechanic

I don't see any reasonable gain from it, its already a straight pipe, it just has a coffee can wrapped around it with fiber glass in between. do a google image search for "cross section exhaust resonator" and you will see what im talking about

huntingman2706217

if your going to run full exhaust then ya why not... but if your wanting to get rid of it and weld in a stick of autozone pipe then your wasting your time and money... my 2010 Z71 5.3 has one cat per side... then the resonator... then a chunck of flex pipe... then the muffler... lol... well had a muffler... lol... it actually sounds like a bad butt race "truck" keeping the resonator on it and no muffler... sounds like i got a built motor vs. loud crap when they run just straight pipes with cats...

gvns8

Ya I will probably have to settle for my current system for now, so I'll probably just leave the resonator alone. And yea it must be pretty loud with no muffler.