CA/LA Smog

[EthanolTurbo]

If you need a recommendation hit me up.

[cobra]

One of those rare cases where you want to find a shop that is really bad at their job 😆

[Xmetal]

None of the shops I've been to in OC in the past ten years have ever opened my hood or looked under the car for cats. My car looks fairly stock but idk, I guess I've been lucky 🤷♂️. I'll DM you the last shop I used.

I don't know - I think you're just lucked out. We're in the same Irvine area and every places that I've been to in the last 12yrs+ had looked for the cats. Some even put mirrors under my passenger wheel to inspect it

[skristedja]

None of the shops I've been to in OC in the past ten years have ever opened my hood or looked under the car for cats. My car looks fairly stock but idk, I guess I've been lucky 🤷♂️. I'll DM you the last shop I used.

[Tbonem3]

In my experience, many smog techs don't look too hard for the cats on our cars. Some do, some know exactly what it's supposed to look like.

If you've got all the trims and heat shields in place, with cats in sect 1, and post cat o2s installed and monitors are green, you'll pass as long as the tech doesn't hassle you about the larger, probably shinier pipes in sect 1. If they even know what our sect 1 is supposed to look like. Some techs just want you to have cats and pass the obd2 monitors, that's it, visual isn't as important.

I did this for a few years with euro headers/cats. It all looked and performed like stock and the tech never questioned anything. But euro parts are factory as well, so nothing out of the ordinary looks-wise, versus my ssv1 pipes, for example.

You might just have to visit different smog shops and play innocent if they happen to know what our stock sect 1 looks like or really look hard past the passenger wheel into the gap between reinforcement plate and header pipes. Can't see anything from engine bay with heat shields.

[ATB88]

Hey everyone, been too buried finishing my thesis to think about the car these last few months, but I've got a set of SSV1s with racing cats burning a hole in my apartment floor and wanted to get to it sometime this month.

Thing is, my registration's due early 2022, and it's a smog year for me (I'm in CA/Los Angeles (Pasadena)).

So, naively, if I went ahead and did the headers now, I'd just have to revert back to stock in 6 months, then reinstall right after. I also have a CSL airbox, but reverting that to stock is very easy and doing that for smog doesn't bother me. Headers are a bitch and I'd much rather do this job once than thrice, but I also wanna get those headers in ASAP so I can finally dyno tune and enjoy!

I used to know of places I could go where getting a pass wouldn't be an issue, but do not any longer. I'm wondering if anyone in the area knows a place that would pass me with SSV1 and cats (and a CSL box)? All else is stock. I'm in Pasadena but willing to go anywhere around LA, and will also be in the bay area many times between now and when smog's due, so that works too. DMs are wide open, tips extremely appreciated