Has anyone had any experience or know of anyone that has powdercoated headers? Any suggestions on keeping headers pretty & easy to clean is welcomed. Thanks. Troy.
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Remember....... Tim the toolman Taylor says " If you didn't build it yourself, It isn't yours".
We had the entire exhaust on our 20 valve motor ceramic coated (I think it was ceramic). Made a huge difference. Previous to that we had the wrap around it, but the ceramic coating was way betetr then the wrap, both in the looks department and in stopping more heat soak.
I got it done here in Victoria. For the headers, pipe, muffler etc I think it was around $300-$400 from memory. Looked really good and was also very, very durable. We raced it for around two years before selling it and it still looked brand new.
Wolf, before getting it done I did a lot of research which showed that when done properly, there is a slight increase in power, but it was certainly not enough to ever notice. Apparently by keeping more heat inside the pipe, it is supposed to aid in the flow of exhaust gasses or something, with a slight performance increase. They coated both the inside and outside of our exhaust.
From experience, I can say that I didn't notice any performance change, but it made a huge difference to stopping heat soak. you could hold your hand almost on the exhaust without feeling any heat, whereas with the exhaust wrap that we had it suffered from a lot of heat soak. To get the added length in our exhaust we had it running under the sump and it made a significant difference to the oil temp with the coating. It also made it a lot easier to work on during the breaks, etc as there was less heat.
They also look very good and they don't get the mud, etc sticking to them.
We used ceramic coating on the extractors of a V8 Commodore Rally Car. We found that there was a performance gain - BUT we believe that this was from greatly reduced under bonnet temperatures (not particularly relevant to a buggy) High engine bay temperatures were an issue for this car - leading to higher engine coolant and oil temps.Oil temps in particular were greatly reduced after coating. Opening the bonnet in a service prior to coating was like stepping into a kiln - but after coating we were able to work in the engine bay without heat related drama. This reduced heat assisted with the life expectancy of hoses, belts, engine bay wiring etc..
Ive seen the exhaust run under the sump for more torque on a few cars - have you ever had damage issues with it?
And yeah - a pretty racecar is a fast racecar!
Yeah, we ran the pipes under there to get some more length in them to aid the torque.
We never had any damage issues, as we had the pipe wrapped with exhaust wrapping, however over time it gets tears in it, it looks crap because of the build up of dirt, etc. After getting the ceramic coating we didn't put any wrap on the pipes and the oil temp, even though it wasn't a problem before, was actually a reasonable amount cooler with the ceramic coating as opposed to the exhaust wrap.
It also made it easier to work on iin the pits, etc because it didn't radiate as much heat. If you touched your hand on it you knew it, but you could work closely to it without any problems.
