S&Xtype sports cats.

[J44EAG]

This is an interesting subject.

Sports cats normally cost an arm and a leg. For a Jaguar V6/V8, most tuning houses will take nearly £2000 off you for such a mod. Well known exhaust manufacturers certainly know how to charge for their products but one can often find that a core unit does not really cost an outrageous figure. One can pay heavily for the name printed on the exhaust.

Then on ebay, up come these 200 cell units for less than £90 each. A fitting charge from around £150 upwards for each unit is quoted. This business is based in Romford, Essex. Work entails welding the aftermarket unit to the down pipe having first removed the original factory 400 cell units.

The concept for a sports cat system is that by reducing the number of cells in each unit, a faster and less restrictive exhaust flow path is created which should result in increased performance. Do not confuse these units with DPF filters found on modern diesel engines.

Quite obviously these units are aftermarket and are probably not designed for any specific application. That in itself need not necessarily be much of an issue. To a greater or lesser degree, at the end of the day, a cat is just a downstream component working with an oxygen sensor (Lamda) to read "before" and "after" oxygen content values.

The link here shows the product and also the pipe sizes available.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/JAGUAR-X-TYPE ... 25829a61f1

The price of these units seems almost too good to be true. i`m certainly interested in what I see but the obvious "caveat emptor" must apply.

My exhaust from cats back is none standard at 60mm being a Miltek unit. In other words, my modified S-type R exhaust had to be sleeved up from below the standard 50mm cat down pipe to fit the Miltek. I see 2.5" units offered which tempts me and that dimension is about 2mm bigger than60mm. However, that could be got over.

Going a bit further, fitting STR manifolds could also be interesting!! Then I could port out the heads.......

I think I might give these guys a call and see what their hack is.

Comments please guys.

Mike