Everyone that says that taking the cat off is illegal is 100% correct and i don't recommend removing the cat either. However, i know a bunch of people that are running straight pipes and have not been busted (yet). If you wanna roll the dice, go ahead but i think you should go with a high flow cat. About your ability to do it, its pretty easy and there are only a couple of bolts to take out. The only problem is usually these bolts are rusted to crap (especially on older cars) and they don't want to come out. Just because you are a girl it doesn't mean you can do work on cars. The girl in my autoshop class was prolly #2 or 3 in the class of mostly guys.

 

In 2003 the catalytic converter is part of the exhaust manifold. I'm not sure if that changed for the 2004 year civic. Just pop the hood and check it out. If it is then you'll probably either have to gamble by replacing it with just a new header leaving it straight-pipe and hope you don't run into a cop having a bad day or you can do that and get yourself a universal cat converter and weld it somewhere on the downpipe. Either way good luck finding a header for your LX. I couldn't find one so I slapped a EX header on and had the downpipe extended to the header making it straight-pipe to the exhaust and 100% illegal. But I just got in my universal cat and once my next paycheck comes through I'm gonna take it to my local muffler shop to get it welded on to the downpipe. Alot of headaches in all.

 

The cat you are talking about is prolly a pre cat. Its a smaller cat that is located close to the exhaust manifold. Since its smaller it heats up and burns emissions before the big cat heats up. I think you will still have a cat under the car.

 

nah that's the only cat I had on my 2003 lx. I thought it was kind of weird.

 

Which ones are good hi flow ones? Dynomax?