Smog test fail, Catalytic convertor or what?? Options

[bigredcelica]

Hi,
I have 1994 St202 Celi with a 3S GE injun with 90K miles. I have recently got a NCT test (Irish road worthiness test) which includes a similar test to the smog emmissions test. My low idle (1000 revs) showed fine but my high idle (2750 revs) came in over spec. The standard is 0.3 where my results were 0.4 These are ppm results, or a multiple of, for CO or Carbon Monoxide.

I brought this to a garage where the emmissions showed results of 0.005 for high idle but as soon as the revs were dropped the result shot up massively for a few seconds. He tells me that the cat is gone (nine lives my ass). Is he right? I wouldn't be very trustworthy of his business and need verification before buying. I don't partiucularly want to go down the road of adding Ethynol or such like to the fuel just to pass - I would rather get the car as it should be.

Any thoughts?

[Junior]

It could be your cat. No matter what car you get, it is almost guaranteed you'll run into a problem with your cat, if you keep it long enough. You could try retarding the timing and using premium gas with an octane booster. This may help, depending on how bad you failed.