Header Wrap or High Temp paint on scruffy looking long tubes?

Any experience on this?   Long tubes on a 5.0 Fox Mustang are looking scruffy.  There -may- be some benefit found in heat retention as well...

Stainless or mild steel?  I have been quite impressed with the generic Amazon heat wrap.  

I have heard wrapping mild steel headers is a death sentence.  

93gsxturbo said:

Stainless or mild steel?  I have been quite impressed with the generic Amazon heat wrap.  

I have heard wrapping mild steel headers is a death sentence.  

 

 

I've also seen that, the theory is that the wrapping holds moisture, accelerating corrosion.

I've wrapped some headers and they actually burned through. Corrosion didn't seem to be a factor.

High temp paint only works up to a certain level of "high temp", but it's certainly easy enough to do. If I was just interested in appearance, I'd probably do that.

My daily driver truck has the Eastwood manifold paint on the long tube headers. Been on there for a few years now and has very few burned off spots. I use that manifold paint on a lot of exhaust parts and very fair results on all of them. At least here in the south. The poor 15 is also a good stuff as far as their cast iron manifold paint goes when used on Rusty mild steelheaders

The header on my Datsun has been wrapped for the last 15 years. When I swapped out the motor 5 years a go I checked and they were fine.

EDIT: keep in ind I live I the Mojave Desert

I have wrapped headers and never had a problem.  Then, I did.  Alot.  2 different exhausts basically deteriorated to nothing within a year.  The wrap was actually holding the tubing together.

So, ymmv.  I have had great luck and horrible luck with header wrap.

Why not both?

My AE92's header has no paint and volcanic wrap, I had one spot that seemed to burn through but no problems otherwise.

What is the actual benefit of header coatings and wraps? Just to keep underhood temps cool or is there some performance benefit to keeping the exhaust gasses as hot as possible? There are tons of way to mitigate engine bay heat, like radiator ducting and hood venting. 

I did it on the racecar to keep heat off the firewall / floor area after long stints.  Even with stuff on the firewall / floor, it would still get crazy hot.  Headerwrap dropped the temps way down.

I have since started using the fiberglass wool with the aluminum backing anywhere I need to keep heat away from something.

Header wrap is awesome at mitigating underhood heat on tight engine bays or when there are damageable things in close proximity.  

The other option is Swain Tech coating, but they are pretty spendy for a McBudget build.  But oh man is that stuff nice.  

I have a different opinion of Swain. It's pretty when it comes back, but the stuff on my car is spalling and cracking and just plain falling off. It can't handle the heat of a naturally aspirated V8. It didn't help as much as I wanted on heat management. I would not spend the money again.

This is not the worst area. I don't have a picture of the section where it's coming off in larger sections.

What did make the difference was DEI Floor and Tunnel insulation in the tunnel.

The reason I wrapped a header back in the day was because the thin wall tubing had added a "ring" to the exhuast note I didn't like. So I damped it with the wrap. Worked just fine until it holed the header.

maschinenbau said:

What is the actual benefit of header coatings and wraps? Just to keep underhood temps cool or is there some performance benefit to keeping the exhaust gasses as hot as possible? There are tons of way to mitigate engine bay heat, like radiator ducting and hood venting. 

Both, although the performance advantage is pretty small on NA engines, it's more substantial on turbo engines.

I had decent luck with Ceramic coating on my V1 stainless headers.  I got a buddy price of $200 to do it, would not have spent the big bucks I see some folks quoting for it.  I ran them a few years and it held up fine in the rust belt.  It seemed to keep underhood temps which were challenging with that car in check.

I had decent luck with Ceramic coating on my V1 stainless headers.  I got a buddy price of $200 to do it, would not have spent the big bucks I see some folks quoting for it.  I ran them a few years and it held up fine in the rust belt.  It seemed to keep underhood temps which were challenging with that car in check.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Well that's good to know if I do any future exhaust stuff to the BRZ.