 Hey guys, I'm the 50s kid. This is a 2001 Kia Sportage and I now know for sure that it has a bad upper catalytic converter and we need to replace it. But I'm not going to be replacing it in this video. In this video, I'm going to try cleaning it. I've seen a couple other videos on YouTube about cleaning catalytic converter. Some of them have used soap and water. Some of them have used sodium hydroxide. I know one video in particular recommends that you pour like a gallon of lacquer thinner in your gas tank and run that. I don't even want to address that video because that's so unbelievably stupid. What I'm going to do is remove the catalytic converter from the vehicle and soak it first in, I think first lacquer thinner because that's going to dissolve quite a lot of stuff. Then I might soak it in sodium hydroxide overnight. That will definitely remove quite a lot as well. Then I will rinse it probably with a little bit of acetone that kind of cleans out. That will rinse water right out of there. When I soak it in sodium hydroxide, I'll be soaking it in water in sodium hydroxide because you need to dissolve sodium hydroxide in water. I would end up rinsing it with acetone and then I'll put it back on the car and so on and so forth. I want to talk about how we're going to test to see if the cat is bad before we even try things and how to test if it's good after we try things. In some of those other videos, people are fond of taking an infrared thermometer and pointing it at the beginning of the cat and after the cat to tell if the outlet temperature is 100 degrees hotter than the inlet temperature. That will tell you if your cat is technically working because basically if you see the same inlet temperature as the exhaust temperature, that definitely will tell you that it's not working. But even if you see that it's 100 degrees hotter at the outlet, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is working. You can have a cat that's 100 degrees hotter at the outlet and still not be working efficiently enough to do its job and pass its an emissions test. That is not a valid test to tell whether a cat has is working or not. In order to tell, you need to hook up a scan tool that is able to look at live data and you need to look at the downstream oxygen sensor and make sure it's not cycling up and down. In fact, even if you don't have that kind of scan tool, you can still do that with a multimeter. You can just unplug the downstream oxygen sensor, stick a multimeter in not the heater circuit. The heater circuit are the two blacks. You want to stick it in the grain, the white or whatever the colors are. The two different colors, the two single colors. Stick a multimeter on there and just read the voltage because the oxygen sensors make their own voltage. You can just look on your multimeter if it's switching up and down, then it's not working. If it's a steady, somewhat higher than 0.6 or something like that, then it's working. So that is what we're going to do in this video where I'm going to use my scan tool because I have it. You guys have seen it in my videos before. But if you don't have a scan tool, that's what you can use. Enough talking. I'm going to pull the cat and we're going to clean it. Okay, we're looking at my scan tool and up here we've got short term field trim. This is long term field trim. This is the upstream oxygen sensor. This is the downstream oxygen sensor. What you're looking at here, this is what a good cat looks like. Supposedly looks like. The downstream oxygen sensor should be steady straight across. Upstream should be fluctuating up and down from rich to lean. But this does look like a working cat and I did say that my cat was bad. Well, here's how I know. If I increase the speed of the engine, you see that the downstream oxygen sensor starts fluctuating up and down, rich and lean, rich and lean. That's one way that I know that this catalytic converter is bad. The second way I know is by performing an pro-pain storage test or an oxygen storage test. Pro-pain enrichment test, same thing. What we're going to do is we're going to introduce propane into the intake. I have my camping stove hose that I've taken the valve core out of and I'm just using this to introduce a lot of propane. One reason I'm doing this is because the tip that I have for my propane torch doesn't let out enough propane. If you have a big tip, then you can just use that. What you need to do is increase the speed of the engine and turn on the propane. What we're going to see is the upstream oxygen sensor is going to go way rich. As I'm adding the propane and once I turn it off, it'll drop lean and on a good cat, the downstream oxygen sensor will stay rich for a couple of seconds longer before it drops to lean. If they drop at the same time, that's how you know that the cat is bad as well. Let's perform that test. Increase the speed of the engine and open the propane. I've got enough propane going in now to turn off the propane. Let's stop that right there. You can see I turned off the propane right at around frame 395. If we look right here, around 395, that's when it dropped lean as well. There's no oxygen storage in this cat. Cats just about dead. Those are the two ways that I know for sure that this is a bad cat. I'm going to repeat these two tests after I clean the cat and see if we see any kind of improvement. Okay guys, I got a two gallon bucket and I got the cat pulled out. This is what it looks like. This is the top of it. There's the bottom. So my intention is to use lacquer thinner and here in California, I can't get the same lacquer thinner that the rest of the country can get. I've got to have VOC compliance. So basically, it's mostly acetone. It also has yours. Yours probably still has tool you in it. I can't get that anymore. They put something else in it. But I can still get zylene for some reason at the Home Depot in Hollywood Boulevard. So hey, I'm going to use that to make up the rest of it. I think this is only about half full. So basically have almost nothing. And this thing is so small that I almost think it could fit in a one gallon paint can. And I might even go out and grab one of those. It turns out I don't have enough solvent. So here I'm going to do the zylene. Zylene and acetone. Those are basically the two most important solvents that I want to use here. Zylene's totally non-polar acetone is polar aprodec. What else can I put in there? I've got a little bit of denatured alcohol just to make up some bulk. We're almost to the top there. I also bought a little more acetone for 12 bucks. That was all I spent really for this particular project. So I'll just use that. I just want to submerge the honeycomb. That's what's important. Now I would have expected a bunch of black gunk to dissolve and come out into the solvents. So far that hasn't happened. So that's not looking good so far for my let's dissolve the carbon and or ash and so it's theory. So anyway let's let that soak for a couple hours. We might be I even brought a lid to keep the solvents from evaporating acetone evaporates pretty easily. So let's leave that for a little while. Obviously you've noticed I'm wearing my chemical resistant gloves. Very very important you use these especially for the next step for the sodium hydroxide step. Don't want to touch sodium hydroxide with your bare hands. That will burn you. Basically same thing as touching hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid. That would just be really dumb. So I'll let this soak for a couple hours. I don't have high hopes in this because if it was going to dissolve anything I would have seen it almost right away. So we'll let this go for a couple hours. See what happens and then we'll move on to sodium hydroxide. Okay guys it's actually been about half an hour. I don't see any point to taking the solvent bath any further. It's not really dissolving much of anything. I mean if it did I would have expected this to not be completely translucent the way it is. Completely see through actually. So just kind of drain a little bit from this. Now this next one is just going to be plain soap and water. Just don't dish detergent. The only reason I'm doing this is just so that somebody doesn't give me crap for not doing it. You know. Don't really think it's going to do anything more. But you never know. Actually look at that. It's doing better on the on the cred. Ooh I already like that. I'm glad I did this then. Probably almost certainly the sodium hydroxide would have done the same thing. And I think this is more the water than the soap. This is the fact that the water is polar because we just soaked it in the other two kinds of solvents. Non-polar and polar aprodec. This is polar product. That's the third type of solvent. Water is polar product. So that being water being polar aprodec it's now dissolving everything that it would dissolve. So I like that. Hey that's pretty cool. So water might do a little something. Let's go the other way. Let's go down a little. I'm going to concern that whatever kind of comes up and stay like I think I want a little more water in here. Perhaps. I just feel like I should have let the water bubbles settle down a little so we can see what we're doing here. Here. I'm going to get some water to add to that. And I'm just using tap water. I'm a little concerned about leaving steel parts in water for too long because they will rust. I don't believe this is stainless steel. I'm just talking about the outside here. So that seems pretty decent to me. Something I want to point out here, this is kind of interesting to me that this bottom side here seems a little more burnt out. Shall we say then this side over here? And there's also a little bit of the honeycomb sort of missing. There's like a little notch of honeycomb missing right along this edge. And I don't really know what else to say about that other than that's interesting. The bottom seems pretty good. I don't know if we can see that. Any more light over here. But I see some black floaty particles in the water. Who knows what it is. So I think that's good enough. I'm going to take this water, dump it out in my sink, not really concerned about it because I think a lot worse comes out of your butt. So it's fine. I'm just going to go rinse this out in my sink and come back and we will do the sodium hydroxide. Let's take a moment to talk about shop safety. Be sure to read, follow and understand the directions that come with your power tools. Not just kidding. Who doesn't love normaverums, right? But in all seriousness, you definitely need some rubber gloves. Make sure that basically anything that you would use to clean an oven with. Chemical resistant rubber gloves important. Also, eye protection. You don't want to splash sodium hydroxide into your eyes. That will blind you. Also if you're going to do this indoors without ventilation, a respirator is a really good idea. If you breathe the fumes from sodium hydroxide, they will burn your lungs. Trust me, not fun. Now sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. Other one will work. You can get this on eBay. They sell it for making soap or biodiesel. Not too hard to get. You used to be able to get this in the supermarket. It's red double life, but I can't get that anymore in California at least. Maybe you guys can, but I can't. Anyway, let's go ahead and prepare sodium hydroxide bath. Some sure nobody remembers this from their high school chemistry class, but you're never supposed to add water to concentrated acids or bases. It has to be the other way around. You add acids or bases to water to dilute them. Now you might be wondering how much to use. I don't really know. I'm just going to use a little bit. Now, here's the thing. When you add sodium hydroxide to water, it's going to heat up the water. If you add too much at all at once, it could have somewhat of a violent reaction. So add it carefully, add it slowly. It'll take a little while to get dissolved. It's going to add some. I don't know. That seems pretty good to me. I'm using a wooden paint stir stick to mix that around. Go ahead and get that going. I'm probably going to need a little more. I'm not giving you an exact measurement for this because there really is no exact measurement for it. We could prepare a 100% saturated solution, but that is absolutely overkill. You can prepare a 10% saturated solution if you want to do that. See if I remember the... You know, I forgot to put my mask on. Okay. I'm not going to be an idiot. Put in the mask on because I can smell it. I wonder what I sound like. I think I sound probably too muffled, don't I? So if you want a little bit of a formula, go ahead and weigh out 100 grams for every one liter of water that you use, and that will make a 10% saturated solution. 10% by weight. Just want to see how warm that is. Not very. I think I might add a little more. I want to make sure it's nice and strong. Okay. That's probably way too much. But we're going to go with that. Now I should have put my glove back on before I did that. Bad me. I can feel the container has heated up quite a bit. So I think that's pretty good. That's another good barometer for you. When the container heats up, I think you know you've added enough that you're actually going to get some cleaning action out of it. I added about half the container. Not sure how much this is. I think this is a two pound container. So again, I probably went way overkill. Just going to let that sort of cool down a little bit. By the way, guys, in case of emergencies, you need vinegar in order to neutralize sodium hydroxide. Okay. Week bases, neutral, weak acids neutralize strong bases. That in hydroxides is strong base. Vanegur is a weak acid. And you guys are getting all kinds of chemistry knowledge today. Okay. That's looking good. Go ahead and submerge this sucker. And we are nice and submerged. Great. So I'm going to let that sit. And now what? Let's just do overnight. Just cause. You know, why not? I think I'm going to don't get once or twice though. Get a little something rinsed out. Don't drop this. It will splash you. You're very, very careful. That would be that right there is probably the mistake that you will make if you're going to make a mistake is dropping that thing. Look at the nice sizzling we got going on. Anyway, dropping that thing is the mistake that I foresee a lot of people possibly making. So don't do that. Look at the sizzling action. Sharing if I mean nothing is aluminum right by the way, never ever don't aluminum in sodium hydroxide because it's going to begin to break it down. This is definitely it's got to be a steel right? You know what? Let's make sure that with a magnet. Yeah, that's steel. This is the part where you want to have your mask on. Okay, my mask is on. Like to get a little more water in there. Be very careful here. As far as why this is sizzling like this, I honestly couldn't tell you. I don't know if rust reacts with sodium hydroxide. I honestly don't remember. Don't think that was something I learned in high school chemistry for what maybe I was absent that day. I do know that aluminum reacts with it, but as far as I know, steel doesn't. So this is interesting to me. So I'm wondering if it's the, I'm wondering if it's this because this looks like it's reacting maybe, maybe the coating on the outside of this shield is reacting. So I'm going to take the shield off. I think in perhaps that might be doing something. Okay, get a good grip on it. Take that in there. So whatever these heat shields were coated with was definitely reacting there. Maybe it was just like the zinc coating or something. Who knows. Now I think whatever, you know, you can see my solution here is discolored, but I think it's discolored because of the reaction with the heat shield here, whatever the chemical was. All right, it's been about three hours and I think I'm going to stop here. I don't see much point to going any farther with this. I think whatever is going to happen has happened. So I'm going to go ahead and rinse this out. And you know what? I believe it's okay to dispose of the sodium hydroxide down the drain because think about it. It's just drain cleaner. You know, they sell sulfuric acid drain cleaner and they sell sodium hydroxide drain cleaner, either caustic or acidic, right? So those go down the drain. Our septic system can handle that or our sewer system can handle that. So it's okay. So I'll be pouring that down the drain. All right, we're all rinsed out. Now the thing is water has kind of a high surface tension, right? So there's still a lot of water kind of trapped up inside the honeycomb structure. You know water, the surface tension is what makes it, makes droplets stick to the side of a glass, right? But if you just like ran acetone around that glass, the acetone would rinse the water away immediately and then the acetone would just kind of evaporate away. That's kind of how you would clean glassware in a laboratory, right? So since my solvent bucket is pretty much mostly acetone, lacquer thinner, all that other stuff, I'm going to use that to just kind of rinse the water away. Didn't we have more solvent? I think it's actually either that or it's probably somewhat evaporated away, I would think. I'll use that extra acetone that I bought. Just kind of pour through there. Let that drain and see how acetone just kind of dries really quickly. You can still hear that there's some on the inside. So let that drip dry for a few minutes until I can't hear any more solvent inside of it. I don't want to, I was thinking about taking an air hose and blowing it out, but I don't really want to aerosolize the acetone too much. It should be fine, but if I'm going to do that, I'll do it outside. Well, I dare say she's ready to go back on the car. Okay, guys, I got the cat reinstalled and I got it nice and warmed up. And let's go ahead and repeat our test. Let's increase the engine speed. Yeah, it looks like that was not a winner right there. Post-cat oxygen sensor still cycling up and down. So we're over one. Let's go ahead and do an oxygen storage test, although I'm sure we know how this is going to turn out. Opening the propane. Closing propane. And as we can see, frame 135 about there dropped and over here about frame 135 it also dropped. So no result on that one. Oh, for two looks like cleaning cats does absolutely nothing as I thought. So there you go. That's conclusive proof that cleaning catalytic converters does not work. And we even had the best test case scenario here. We had a cat that was working in idle and not working at engine speed and still it didn't work. We tried three different cleaning methods. We tried soapy water. We tried solvents. We tried sodium hydroxide. None of it worked. All of our tests came up negative. So that's it. Pretty much if your cat starts to, if you start to get an inefficient cat code, if you get a P0420 or 0422, that's it. You need to buy a new cat. No doubt about it. Now, if you might be wondering, there are a couple other people out there who claim that they've cleaned their cats and they've gotten it to work. And here's my theory on that. I'll see them say, I clean the cat, I reset the codes and they haven't come back. And here's the thing. It takes a really long time. When you're in a situation like this and you're going to get a P420 code, it takes a really long time and a number of drive cycles for the engine computer to finally decide that the cat is not as efficient as it should be. I've been driving this thing around for like a week or two now. You know, multiple drive cycles. I go out during the day, I go out at night when there's nobody on the roads and I do like a driving cycle and I could not get this thing to complete the catalytic converter monitor. That's what's happening. Those people are using scan tools. They don't know about the engine monitors. All they know about is, you know, is there a code or is there not a code? So that is the situation with that. So when you see people claim that they've cleaned their catalytic converters, it's BS. This myth is busted. And thanks a lot for watching, guys.