I am thinking about possible ways to heat shield the turbo and down pipe. I wanted to use a turbo blanket and header wrap, but after reading some stuff on miata.net I can see corky is totally against this. He says that he as seen pipes with holes within a few days. Is this true, will I have any problems going my initial way? Just wanted some of ur opinions.

 

cause it deteriorates the material.

if you cover what you dont want damaged, then nothing will ever fail from heat.

 

why not get the downpipe and turbo ceramic coated?

 

The heat cycling associated with a turbo system is brutal, add in condensation and heat wrap and you have a recipe for disaster. There is a chemical treatment you can do prior to heat wrap to help prevent this, but I forget what it was. Either way, ceramic coating and using stainless steel pipes is the right answer, then shield the components that you don't want damaged.

Mark

 

Looks like **** as well. Ceramic is the only way to go I say.

 

Heat wrapping is a valid process but it brings to light shortcuts in materials and fabrication. Back when I was a "baller" I would ceramic coat, wrap with moistened heat wrap, bake in an oven, coat with three coats of high-temp paint, and bake again all of my exhaust components.

Really I look at the fiberglass wrap as being more of a hardcore/race type of thing. If I'm going to that length its more to keep underhood temps down for perfmance reasons and I accept the fact that my manifold might crack.

 

is the heat wrapping you guys are referring to the Thermo-Tec stuff used to wrap headers and downpipes?

what about the turbo blankets wideopentuning is referring people to Alamo for?

 

they do a good job of stopping the heat from the turbine from radiating, without having to lock in moisture like an exhaust wrap. Using one of them, would be like the same idea as a stainless heat sheild that encompasses the turbine...like the "bowser" heatshield, or the shields Corky uses on his kits.

 

my stock header has a hole or 3 in it, but it's had header wrap on it for about 2 years, so I consider that acceptable.

 

I've never had a problem with heatwrapping when doing it to high quality stainless. Low quality stainless and mild steel are another story.

 

Comeon guys he said it on M.net that the heat wrap stopped the enthalpy of the intake pipes as they bled off heat kinda like a mini IC on a much less effective scale i believe he qouted 15 or so degree temperature differences wit wrapped vs unwrapped intake pipes. the favor being for unwrapped. his reasoning was that the engine bays ambient temperature was still lower than the boosted pipes there fore the heat would leach into the cooler areas.

 

the topic in question is wrapping the exhaust side of the system.