Opinion on Heat Wrapping
 

Okay guys this is just a question from searching around on the forum. I ordered my Stillen G3's recently and read a thread about how to get air up to the intakes. While reading that thread heat wrapping was said to be done on the intake tubes themselves. Does any body have any experience in this area of getting it done? Also thoughts on heat wrapping my LTH from F.I. I will get in touch with Tony and see what he says about that and post it here. Let me know what you think fellas/gals.

/\ as far as heat wrapping your headers, while they will reduce heat coming off the tubes and help contain it in the exhaust, they can also trap moisture and lead to premature wear of the headers themselves. I spoke with Tony about it when I ordered mine and that's one of the reasons i decided to just go with the ceamic coating right off the bat.

As far as wrapping the intake tubes, what gain are you really going to get? When you're moving at speed down the road, there really isn't time for the air getting sucked into your engine thru the CAI tubes to really heat up at all. And when you're sitting in traffic, it might help, but who really cares if you loose a tiny bit of power in rush hour on the drive home??

K cool thanks on the headers. My questions about these options were out of curiosity b/c I have read that someone has done this previously but did not post anything about pro's/con's. I understand your logic about the wrapping of the intakes. My question is b/c our engine is so tightly packed you don't see a gain from wrapping them over extended driving?

/\ Well, here's my 2cents on this. When traveling at speed, the air is going to be moving thru your intake tubing pretty quickly, most likely too quickly to really heat up to any significant degree. Would wrapping the intake tubes help? Maybe, but i seriously doubt it'd be worth any real hp.

The only way to truly know would be to have two sets of tubes, one wrapped and one not and dyno with both back to back and see if there's any real gains. You could also mount a temp sensor of some kind and record iat's with both and compare the difference.

Ya I thought about that as well the travel rate of the air going through the intake. Just like I am wondering about the air flow to the Stillen G3's. Thanks for the response man.

I'm a firm believer in header wrap.

When you switch to an aftermarket header you generally end up with more surface area than the stock headers, which means even more heat radiating off of them, and heat convection from the air passing over them. So you will be increasing the amount of heat given off by your headers, and at the same time you are removing your factory headshields, which by the way are there for a reason.

Keeping that heat in your exhaust will keep your exhaust gas velocity high, which is good for scavenging and overall performance/efficiency.

Excessive underhood temperatures can hurt performance, hinder your cooling system, wiring harnesses can get damaged or melt, rubber will dry and crack sooner, electronics could fail sooner, etc.

If you decide to wrap, I'd recommend the DEI "Titanium" wrap(just a name, not actually made of titanium). It's a lot higher quality than generic fiberglass header wrap.