I just had a friend tell me that its bad to heat wrap headers because they crack easier. Is this true?

 

no its bad because if a drop of oil gets on them they will ignite and your car will burn to crap... this happen to a LS1 locally.. this was one of the FIRST fast LS1 around...

 

It does mess them up. The wrap really eats into the pipe. I had part of my Y pipe wrapped for a year, then removed it, and now you can esee the pattern from the wrap. It's burned into the pipe coating. Also if your wrap gets oily it is a bigtime fire hazard.

 

I think it looks like crap and would never do it.

 

I would avoid heat wrapping. I would recommend getting your headers Jet Hot coated.

 

For daily drivers I think that getting them coated is a good idea.

Do do feel strongly though that if you are serous about the preformace of your car run it on the track mostly doing wraps are one of the best things you can do. Headers don't look nice afterwords that is true and if you use cheap headers you can increase the risk of cracking. It does however help drastically with under hood heat and a noticalble differnce with coolant temps. I only run my car on the track however and its driven 2-3 times a month. I have wrapped my headers for 4 years and I have had no problems with cracking.

 

There are a number of reasons not to get wraps. It voids the warranty on most headers, soaks up oil which can case fires/smoke and creates extra wear. With chemical treating of a header or cermaic coating the header remains cooler as the metal does not absorb as much heat. This maintains a lower engine bay temperature and maintains a lower temperature in the header metal itself. Wrapping it causes the heat to soak into the metal. Since it is wrapped the metal absorbs all the heat and it's unable to escape. I have heard it talked about that when circle track cars used to use header wraps they'd reach such a high temperature that the headers (over the course of a few races) would actual deform and melt. On a street car that's a bite extreme but it is still not healthy for your car.