Just a work of warning… You may want to check with your exhaust manufacturer if wrapping the header/DP voids their warranty. Using thermal wrap puts tremendous stress on the pipe, especially if it has welded flanges. The repeated heating/cooling cycles are almost guaranteed to accelerate the stress on the welds.

 

Have you seen the welds on the HKS dp? I honestly wouldn't think it would be an issue.

 

I traded iodine23 my stock air filter with like 500 miles on it for the wrap since he needs to keep his car as stock as possible for his auto x class, and picked up the paint and metal zip ties from a speed shop called Alamo in San Antonio, all can be found at www.summitracing.com . Yeah I applied 3 coats of the high heat thermal paint after wrapping it, the stuff puts a nice seal on every thing, takes about a week for it to finally cure and the smell to go away.

 

I've had very good success with Swaintech Coatings.

If you care most about function, you should check out their White Lightning Thermal Barrier Coating. May not be as pretty as Jet-Hot but it really does the job. It definately was a contributing factor to getting some very good dyno #'s on my '02 WRX as compared to other stock turbo'd cars with similar mods - (coated the uppipe and downpipe).


http://www.swaintech.com/

 

always thought a hot downpipe is a BAD thing

 

Would there be any benefit to wrapping the intercooler piping?

Would it help to keep piping cooler?

I think I have seen that somewhere before... could be mistaken though.

 

I don't get it...
To my knowledge a hot downpipe would be a no no.
You want to keep you gasses as hot as possible from the headers to the turbo because hot air flows better than the cold and thus spins the turbo faster. On the other side, the reason why you put the bigger downpipe is to increase the flow after the turbo and as well keep its temperature down.
The temperature difference between the turbo inlet and outlet would also create a certain pressure to help it spin even faster.
Therefore a hot downpipe would be bad.

 

I just sent my HKS downpipe off to swain tech. I'm not sure how much the coating will help performance. Keeping the exhaust velocity high right after the turbo may help with scavenging, thereby improving performance somewhat.

 

but keeping your turbo hot reduces it's efficiency thus reducing performance somewhat....

 

I dunno for sure man. Coating companies will also coat you turbo housing to improve efficiency. I think keeping the velocity up before and through the turbo is the way to go. After the turbo (DP), I'm not sure it matters too much. I guess at least a coated dp will help the cat "light off" sooner and protect the oil a bit.

 

Well it's a whole philosophy and without the real life results you can't tell for sure. One thing is certain, you want to keep your gasses hot before the turbo but the rest would be a matter of testing if you ask me. The width of the downpipe as well...
I would not wrap or coat my downpipe. My belief is that it would hurt the turbo efficiency especially since cold air has a tendency to fall and hot to raise so it wouldn't really flow better in the downpipe towards exhaust.
Would be cool to have a set of both coated and non coated, take it to the road coarse for some serious action and stress and record the results.

 

So can any of the tuners tell us if this is a good idea to coat the exhaust manifold or the turbine-side of the the turbo or the downpipe or all 3?

In naturally aspirated conditions, the Jet-hot.com says that it really helps because the hotter air can shoot out of the engine fast and keep going fast because it stays in a super heated state thus it creats a kind of vaccum behind it that helps fill the cylinder with the new air.

So lets see would faster air help out on turbo car? If the air does come out faster out of the engine and stays faster it would spool the turbo up faster. Then it would be up to your intercooler to do the cooling of the air not the turbo. If your have a very good turbo that will allow you to run some serious boost. Its not up to your turbo to cool the air just charge it. But yea if your running your turbo to its absolute limit it will heat up like crazy and maybe jet hot coating wouldn't be a good idea.

But if your turbo is efficient and your intercooler is efficient you could probably improve spool up and lower under hood temps. But how hot can underhood temps get anyways while your driving hard on the highway. I can see this helping ALOT if your city has lots of rush hour traffic then all the heat stays in your engine bay.


Hmmmm.....Any tuners care to elaborate??
Didn't Frank from South Florida Performance say that they can jet-hot coat your exhaust manifolds and turbos if you wanted too?

Later
Omar

 

There is a lot of these heat raps used on racers over here. There is little point in wrapping after the turbo if you don’t wrap before! The idea goes that the wrap acts like a thermal barrier and prevents heat (read energy) loss from the exhaust gasses. This intern means the exhaust gases have a higher velocity and thus will spool up a turbo faster. In reality, there is little gain from this in outright power but every little helps. The main benefits are that the under bonnet temps will be reduced. This will mean colder air getting into the engine and less heat soak into the high pressure charge, thus more power. You can get manifold and turbo wrap kits. These are like bags that loosely fit over the man and turbo, much easier to fit than the wrap. On the intake front, a silver after market pipe will reduce the radiation soak but a silver wrap may help around the known hot areas. Leave the lower pipes clear though, as the cold air flow around these areas will help in cooling.

 

My simplistic thinking is that once the exhaust gases have left the turbine, let 'em cool. The resulting reduction of gas volume will only aid in creating a greater pressure differential between the manifold side of the turbine and the DP side. However I'm probably way off base.

 

i wrapped my hks dp with thermo-tec carbon black 2" and used stainless hose clamps (2) at both ends. you really need to use a whole can of the thermo-tec or any hi temp paint to help the wrap stay in tact. if you don't paint it well it will fray and get really ugly after a while. i mainly did the wrap because of the proximity to the oil pan w/no heat shield. i used to wrap the headers on my race bikes and it held up really well... till i got a one off titanium pipe and i couldn't bring myself to cover that beautiful blue color ti turns on bike headers. for a normally aspirated 4 stroke engine keeping the heat in the pipe = good (increased velocity of exiting gasses)... don't know about turbo apps though. like i said, i wraped mine cause the dp is so close to the oil pan.