Well the fers stole the cat off our Mk2.5 last night. Total btards! They turned up with a brick as well, to bash my head in if I disturbed them? What’s best to do? Replace from manifold down or get my garage guy to make up some pipe for a mid section replacement?
Russ
Sorry to hear that. Hope there wasn’t too much damage and that you are able to sort out a replacement
The £50 CAT is known as an MOT cat. It will pass one and not the next as it has very little precious metals in it.
I had one that lasted years, on my MK1, and passed MOT. I also had a silenced cat bypass!
A sports cat costs more, but I picked up a stainless, emissions compliant cat section for my SVT, for £130. With the cat going for £780, that’s £650 to spend keeping the old girl on the road, which is a win.
Message Rhino666 he can supply a replacement
Just buy an after market replacement, it replaces the down pipe and cat to the flange. I fitted a sports cat in stainless £220 of ebay, it improved the performance and the car revs a lot more freely.
Or get your insurance to pay?
That is a good plan.
Insurance will probably price up a Mazda cat, plus labour, and maybe some exhaust parts. Probably would write the car off given the age.
Yes my son done the same thing with ours , hassle free and it sounds pretty good too
Did you get any power gains? Mine revs really easy now.
Not had much of a chance to get out in it yet as it’s been at the welders for new chassis rails and then it’s having a diff refurb hopefully next week . I’ll give it a good run after and see if it’s benefitted at all . Cheers
I’ve had my OEM exhaust manifold plus front (integral) cat gathering dust in the back of my garage since I changed to a shine RacingBeat 4:1 catless in 2015, so I did what was suggested and sent a photo to Premier Metal on Wednesday this week.
He quoted me £145, Hermes charged me £6 to deliver to Southend and today the cash is in my bank
Great service and very happy with price for what otherwise was scrap so a nice surprise, many thanks Jack
I do hope they made some checks to make sure you hadn’t pinched it off somebody else’s MX5…
Yes they did; I was required to provide registration number of car from which it was removed AND copy of my own drivers licence, so I was very impressed at their whole approach
Excellent
I cashed two old cats in last week, £625 inc VAT for the pair. Prices are indeed at an all time high, I was getting nothing like that last time, wish i’d waited now!
They also said that if they didn’t know me and I was a business they wouldn’t entertain me, maybe they’d had problems recently.
I don’t leave customers cars outside, but had an old MX5 of mine parked in the communal yard a few months ago, at approx 7am someone came in and jacked it up ready to take the cat. Luckily my neighbour was in, he saw them on camera and chased them off.
I wonder where the cats are going then?
The thieves must have a reliable outlet for them.
That’s who the cops should be targeting.
Not all buyers are so scrupulous. There are fences too (not wooden ones 
)
Out of interest the place I go to have a very curious system of identifying the cats.
I can tell them make, model and year, but they aren’t interested at all. They take a pic and send it some experts mobile phone, he then texts back with the type and it’s value.
I know this sounds very odd, but that’s what they do!
You’re right, it does sound very odd 
Outside of London, the number of thefts is quite small; 7% of the total (1215). Yet car ownership in London is the lowest in England (0.8 cars per household versus 1.1 across England. Notice in the table earlier in thread, no cities outside of London in the South East even register.There might be some skewing in London; maybe the cars are newer, maybe there are more low emission (Prius) cars. But the numbers smack of organised crime, probably involving a relatively small crew. Outside of London, its opportunist.
The police recently raided addresses in London, Essex and Kent. Few arrests, and only 20 odd catalytic converters recovered, but the operation was sophisticated. It appears not to centre on car scrapyards, but other recyclers. As is telling in this photograph released by the police. Besides the cats, all I am seeing are old washing machines and general scrap, not car parts.
The report indicated the police had seized containers full of stolen metal bound for the Ivory coast. I suspect the stolen cats are quickly stripped down, and loaded into containers that are constantly leaving the country.
The photo also highlights the major flaw with cages to protect cats.
The raids also recovered £50k in cash and drugs. There you have it.
In further raids across the country, a further 1000 catalytic converters were recovered and 56 arrests made. Operation Goldiron covered Northern England and Wales. Now I’m assuming stolen cats from years gone past don’t hang around. But 25 recovered in LOndon, and 1000 elsewhere, representing some fraction of 2020 thefts. Are London stolen cats ending up in the North, or in fact, most of the cats being stolen outside of London just aren’t being moved on, and left lying around (less than 1000 cats were stolen outside of London 2019/20). ie. they are not that easy to move on, unless the criminals have contacts outside of the regular scrap trade.
In the US, cat thefts seem to be more opportunistic, and mostly by people with a drug habit; I’ll take a wild guess at crystal meth.
