Well the dreaded day of today came where I had to take my first gen b16 crx to the emissions station. Well long story short after a long wait, I failed. I had to many hydrocarbons. The state standard is 220 ppm and I had 307 ppm. I just put a brand new magnaflow high flor cat on so I dont know why it is failing. When I last filled up I put about half a bottle of Seafoam engine cleaner in my gastank. Could this have lead to failing? thanks for input/help

 

maybe its the cat. just a guess. or too rich? Wish I was a mechanic. Bump for answers.

 

run the seafoam out of it, and put the factory cat back on...I haven't personally seen a magnaflow cat, but I am assuming it is like most "high flow" cats, which is a glorified resonator

also what type of test was this...simulated road test, or two speed idle?

 

If your cat is too big for the application then it may never get hot enough and could cause you to fail. You need to list all the numbers also, HC, CO, CO2, O2, NOx, etc.

 

hc:307 ppm :fail CO 1.11 pct: Pass Nox: n/a.. i guess they didnt get to nox or didnt test for it. the magnaflow cat does have a honeycomb peice inside so it is not a resonator because I bought it to replace the ebay resonator that was on there before. I do not have a factory cat being that it would be to small for my exhaust . Would retarding the timing help any? I will run the rest of the gas out of it and not use seafoam anymore.

 

I have the same setup as you and I passed catless by a good margin, something is wrong

 

you have ignition problems and get rid of that stupid high flow cat. they are a rip off and dont do anything. basically do a tune up. plugs wires cap rotor check the spark from the coil. hydrocarbons are unburned fuel basically. and if you live in texas we dont check for nox. also all a cat does is help out emissions. if your engine is running fucked up sometime it will not pass even with a new cat. for example i had a 1987 fiero come in running no cat and that thing put out the lowest numbers i have seen in a long time. and it hadnt been driven in a year