#1
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Hanging from the cat?
So I am driving along the other day in my 1996 Altima and start to pass another vehicle. About 3/4 through the acceleration phase, I hear a sound like my muffler has just come loose, so I slow down again and pull over to check things out. When I look under the car, I see this small sensor-looking object hanging by a couple of wires.
Initial investigation leaves me pretty clueless, so I get out the jack and get the thing up so I can get under it a little better. Onced I get under there, I see these two wires coming out of the floorboard and attached to a metal tube about the thickness of a pencil and maybe 4 or 5 inches long-and absolutely NOWHERE for it to go! I finally find a corresponding hole in the drivers side rear of the cat, so I assume that this is an O2 sensor or something of that nature. It looks like the threads were stripped, so I am thinking that maybe it got blown out when I was accelerating. I can stick the thing back up into the hole and it will stay there until I have to accelerate hard, and then it just blows out again. Other than the noise from a dime-sized hole in the muffler, I can see/hear/feel no difference in the operation of the car. My questions are these: What is this thing and/or what does it do? Following that, what happens if the thing falls out again and I don't get it put back in a timely manner? And finally, is there another way of fixing this without resorting to a new cat? thanks! |
#2
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The oxygen sensor communicates with your vehicles ECM and lets it know if the engine is running lean or rich for a better fuel economy. You can either try bonding it with some special material or just go and buy a new catalytic converter. There isn't much you can do when it comes to a broken thread inside the catalytic converter where the oxygen sensor installs. You need some special material and probably something to heat it up with while you got the oxygen sensor into its place. Hopefully someone on this forum has actually done this and can guide you further. Good luck.
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cat, hanging |
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