Wow, you have some work ahead of you. Yes you can pass with 1 cat in theory but like the above person said it does have to be close to the engine to be efficient. However since your car is being tested through the computer and not sniffer that is not as important. You have to make all the O2's work and all of the not ready tests need to be complete. I am not familiar with your exact car but you should have 4 O2's so someone has hidden the connectors or eliminated them. This will be your biggest hurdle. The secondary air issue isn't hard to fix and your MIL could be out for numerous reasons. You are going to need some professional help on this one and it may be neccessary to contact the previous owners of this car for more info on the history of the mods to try and reverse the hacking to get you through testing. Contact me if you want to meet to try and get a plan together. It can be done but it will be time consuming. Hve you found out what kind of programmer you have and what it changed in your car?

 

the programmer is a hypertech. it seems very basic, like you can change rear end ratio, shift firmness, shift rpm, stuff like that. it has a performance toon and a stock tune so I went back to the stock tune for now, doesn't really seem to make a difference.

so you really think the o2's that are on the headers are the upstream o2's? there was quite a bit of extra wire with them so I was thinking that maybe they were the rear o2's and the guy pulled them up to the front for some reason. I couldn't find any other wires that could be for o2's, so I guess they hid them well.

I already contacted the previous owner and although he seems happy to help, he doesn't seem like he remembers much of anything. he had the car in kansas before he moved here so emissions was never an issue.

isnt there someone out there that can just flash the computer and make it send out the right signals to pass emissions?

also, what happens if I just go back for the retest and fail? thats what happened with my camaro and I never got any more correspondence from dmv about emissions.

 

I looked up your car in my online system and you are supposed to have 4 O2's. 2 on the manifolds and 2 post cat. Somewhere your wiring is hidden or removed. Does the previous owner have the stock manifolds to check? My system says the left upstream O2 screws into ypipe and the right side screws into the manifold. The 02's you have now have likely had the wires extended but i would have to scan the car to check o2 voltages to see which are open(circuit). The Hypertech program is harmless and isn't your problem once you have put the stock program back in. There very well may be someone with there own program for bypassing all of this stuff but you will still need the MIL operational to pass the bulb check. You can fail again but when it comes time for registration renewal dmv will make you pass before giving up the reg. This means paying for temp. tags just to go through emissions if your expired. Thats of course if the info gets to dmv, it is still a flawed system communication wise.

 

thanks for your help, I'll try to give you a call tomorrow. I have to work midnight tonight and tomorrow, then I'm off for the weekend.

 

More than likey they put O2 wire extensions for the sensors in the header collectors, the stock length will not fit. If they left the pre-cat O2's your motor would be really confused and constantly running in open loop mode, in which case you would have been setting off more codes than were reported. I don't know if you have to pass a visual inspection or not, but theoretically you can program the aft-cat O2 codes out of the computer. My recommendation would be to go to your nearest auto-parts store and see if they can scan your computer for all stored and current trouble codes. This should give us a better chance of tackling the issues you're having.