Guys please, just go to a muffler shop and have them weld up a generic aftermarket cat, it's not that expensive. On my 96 sportgage (which only had 1 cat) the price for replacing it with a generic, TOTAL with labor, was only $160. I know the one close to the exhaust manifold would be more expensive but still, I bet they could do it there too.
Please don't be too quick to run no cat. This is the one biggest way you can make your car pollute more. Running with no cat produces up to 5 times the carbon monoxide. Why would you want that? Just running your engine inside your garage for a few minutes (even with the door open) could become a dangerous situation with this much carbon monoxide, especially if you have children. There have been cases of children dying just from playing under or near a truck whose engine was running and producing too much carbon monoxide.
Like someone else said, modern cats do not restrict the exhaust enough to make you lose any power. In fact on the Sportage you WILL lose low-end torque if you remove all backpressure. Any gains in power you get from removing the cat are most likely in your imagination. Run with no muffler if you want but don't remove the cat completely. At least then you will only annoy people not endanger their health.
Let's be honest, removing the SLIGHT restriction of the cat might help if your engine is VERY tuned (we're talking turbo or supercharged, headers, cams, porting, boost, etc. etc) but on the stock Sportage, the idea that removing the cat will give you more power is a JOKE. Very few of us have enough REAL performance mods for it to make a difference, and I am not talking about silly fabric air filters that make little or no difference. Don't get me wrong I have nothing against fabric air filters, in that they last FOREVER and can be re-used over and over just by cleaning them, and may even remove as much or more dirt than normal filters, that's all great. But if you think a "high flow" air filter is going to improve your performance without also doing all the "real" engine mods then you are living in a world of imagination.
Just my 2 cents.
By the way, on a related note: Hundreds die every year in the U.S. from carbon monoxide poisoning while BOATING. Boats produce as much as 188 times the carbon monoxide that a car engine produces. People die just from swimming near the boat when the engine is running. Just in case you wanted an example of how dangerous this stuff can be. Hmm I wonder why boats produce so much carbon monoxide? Because they have no catalytic converters for one thing, and also because the EPA has only been regulating boat engine emissions for the last decade or so. This just shows how much these emissions control systems really help to reduce pollution and make engines safer. Don't believe the conspiracy theories, this stuff is here to keep us safe and make the world a less crappy place.
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