Is it possible that the internals of the resonator can come apart and rattle? I removed the cat heat shield a while ago due to a rattle and the shield on the resonator is weilded on good so I dont believe its that. So can this go bad from the inside causing it to rattle?

There is really nothing inside of a res that would come apart and rattle. Your cat however would rattle like nuts if the inside of it came loose.

There is a heat shield above your muffler that could rattles as well.

The resonator is a pipe with holes in it. The holes lead to the chambers of the stuff that surrounds the resonator, which you see from the outside. If anything gets "stuck" in one of the holes, if that'* even possible from the exhaust flow, then it can't rattle because of the packed material in there. It seems like you have a bad cat. This is a fine time to put on a high flow catalytic converter!

If the cat is bad wouldnt it throw a ses light?

I don't recall if your year has a rear O2 senosr. If you don't have one then there'* going to be no code. You can get a good free flow cat from ZZ performance for about $70 or so. This is the one I'm running and I'm happy with it.

The 96 SSEi has OBD2 with a rear O2 sensor. Maybe the cat is bad but just isn't horrible enough?

X2

I'm with Rad. Dan the 'only' difference between the 97 SSEi and the 96 SSEi is the transmission.

All our components are the same. So you can help anyone with a 96.