Z28 camaro exhaust help?

Good question.

As far as operability, I would imagine that federal cats would do just fine. As far as playing with fire and trying to stay in business, the guy might be trying to be careful and replace like with like and keep on the up and up in regards to emissions law.

First off, a guy who's dead-nuts wrong about climate data should not be trusted with emissions questions on cars! Just sayin'...

The shop is wrong; your Z28 will pass a sniffer test with any set of good quality cats. The "so-many" people running these cars without cats are just as wrong, unless they're running track-only, since removing them entirely is breaking the federal law - and unless you're running a heavily modified or super/turbocharged setup, you won't get more than 2-5 hp out of pulling the cat as opposed to running a high flow cat, or set of cats.

I believe I'm running a 3" high flow Magnaflow cat on my 95Z28 - I have emissions-legal bbk headers running to a y-pipe to a 3" race cat/borla cat-back setup, which could support 400 hp without a problem. And I haven't had one problem with failing a sniffer - or a visual check.

Your best bet is to move to a State where there are no emissions tests at least in the rural areas. Air quality has been improving every since they began testing it in the 1980s just like the Earth has not been warming since they began actually measuring it. This current trend in temp is just a 15 year hiccup in the advance into another ice age which is the norm for this planet.

if you look on the summit racing website you will find some magnaflow direct fit catalytic convertors for your car,, they are 179 each the part number is MPE-36105 and they are 50 state legal