DISCLAIMER: I have had enough of people for the week and I still have one day to go. I am out of patience for people who don't know what they are talking about and am going to be quite blunt. I do have facts and data to support my points and will provide them if requested. I do have certifications that would qualify me to testify in court as an expert witness. If you do not, do not argue with what I am saying. If you are going to say I am wrong, I want to see your certifications.
If you are going to get all butthurt about what is in this post, don't read it.
Hate so say this, but what the feds don't know ain't gonna hurt them at all. I bought my Bronco 2 without a CAT, so I don't know if it had one to begin with. After an engine damage mess on a previous vehicle when a CAT failed I avoid them to begin with. The Cat does nothing except cause back pressure on the engine constantly creating less power and eventually engine damage.
What a wonderfully ignorant post.
The catalytic converter does several things, causing a power robbing restriction on any vehicle built after 1980 is not one of those things.
The natural products of the internal combustion engine are hydrocarbon (an ozone depleting emission), leftovers from unburnt fuel, carbon monoxide (highly toxic), and Oxides of Nitrogen or NoX (also highly toxic) which are created at temps above 2900 (easily achieved in a normal combustion chamber).
The cats take these damaging by-products and oxygen absorbed from the atmosphere and rearranges them into water (obviously not toxic) and carbon dioxide, which can kill you but is not produced at toxic levels and it processed out of the atmosphere by plant-life, something that does not happen with the un-refined exhaust.
To sum up, in this case, yes what the Feds don't know can actually hurt them, no I don't want to hear the argument "but it's just one guy doing it" because eventually that mentality leads to that "one guy" being everyone, and lastly, if you truly believe that the emissions control devices are there to do nothing other than hurt performance you are a moron.