Okay,
I need lots of help. I crossed my spark plug wires on my '95 Contour SE a month ago. In the process I cooked my pre-cat on the rear bank. Now the car is way down on power and only getting 250 miles per tank. I used to get around 300. The car has 112K miles and I owe $3500 on it so what I want to do is gut the pre-cats and unload the car. (I got a third syncho problem too, but that's another problem.)
So, here is my question. How do I gut my pre-cats?? Looking under the car, I see the rear cat looks like it only needs to be unbolted and reamed out. Any suggestions on how to do this?? Any suggestions on how to unbolt the Y pipe without shearing bolts off?
Now, do I absolutely need to gut the front as well? How hard is it to gut the front pre-cat? I noticed that it has a little turn in and would be hard to ream out getting reamer to make a bend. Any advice? I don't want to take off the manifolds. It looks way too hard. And I've thought about drilling holes in the exhaust but I'm against that. I just want to get something up there and ream it out.
Next question. Are the MIL absolutely needed? I can live with a check engine light on but how necessary is it? I need to know. Will it affect the car running too rich?
Another thing...in all of this my oil consumption has dramatically increased. I was losing about a quart every 3000 miles but not i'm going through a quart a week. The oil leak originally seemed to be coming from a front valve cover. Now I'm not so sure where it is coming from. At first I thought it was coming from the tail pipe. I don't see smoke but it does smell pretty bad.
Now, I imagine I should replace an O2 sensor. How much do they run? I need some real help and I would appreciate is someone could address ALL of my concerns.
Thank you very much. I may have some follow up questions.
Paul
