Hey daves, thanks for the info on the wrap, I am starting this here instead of hijacking.
What I am after is keeping the boost up when pulling in the rain, as soon as a puddle wets the pipe I lose almost 2 lbs of boost because it just sucks the heat right off the pipe.
Have you heat ruined your crossover yet?, some pipes dont like to keep it in.
I have 10 shorter pistons, arp studs, I ported the heads and exhaust manifolds,turbo has a bigger comp wheel and housing for quicker boost down low. super 60 I think the man I got it from said.
My biggest problem is the IC covering the rad and getting HOT in the summer.
I am going to mod the fan clutch to kick in sooner and install a 7.3 ps IC that is about 6 inches shorter that the 6.0 one I have now.
Runs great and I love it

 

I painted my pipes with several coats of ceramic high heat paint before I put the wrap on.
Then wrapped the pipe with a layer of header wrap.
I soaked the layer of header wrap with several heavy coats of paint, letting each coat get almost dry before repeating application.
Four coats total after the wrap.
Let that cure overhight, and then wrap the pipe again with header wrap and repeat the paint layers again.

Same treatment on the turbo up pipe as well.

I then used the balance of the header wrap I had on the top of the down pipe.
Started about 1.5" from the turbo end and had enough to get down to the second bend where the exhaust goes flat under the cab.
I also soaked that wrap with paint.

Seems to have dropped the cab temp a couple degrees in the summer.

Boost increased several pounds after the wrap, but there were several mods that happened at the same time.
So not sure which was responsible for the most increase.

Since I can touch the pipe with my hand while the pyrometer is reading 4 or 500 degrees, I guess it is working well.

I was wanting to wrap the exhaust manifolds as well, but that did not work very well when it came time to bolt them on.
Probably could have worked if I had laid a couple strips from front to back, then cut narrow strips to wrap around the pipe between exhaust ports and painted it till it was solid.

I was getting to impatient at that stage of the rebuild to mess with it that long.

 

Thanks, where did you find the ceramic paint. Is just the vht header paint?

 

I've always been leery of pipe wrap. I've heard many times that it is very bad to run on mild steel because it actually causes the steel to degrade much faster than it normally would. I dunno.

 

If you look carefully on the label, most of them state that using it can void the warranty on headers, etc. You can use it as long as you don't mind replacing the pipes every so many years.

 

Most people don't soak the header wrap with paint.

All that fabric would hold a lot of water against the pipe in it's natural state.

I did it looking for more boost, the paint looked like a good option to keep it dry.
I am happy with the boost numbers, I can get to the mid 20's, so even if I have to replace the pipes a bit sooner, small price to pay.

I think the paint was made by Krylon...I will see if I still have a can in the garage later.

 

Well, the issue isn't really with it holding in water, it's the fact that the heat held in by the wrap fatigues the metal faster than it normally would.

I just read somthing online earlier and even Gale Banks himself doesn't advise wrapping a downpipe with header wrap unless it's stainless steel.

 

obviously gale banks was okay with wrapping the up pipes... at least on his older turbos.

all of the square box banks turbos I've pulled at the junkyard had pipe wrap on the uppipes. On another note, none of the pipes were in bad condition, which considering 8-9 years on a truck + 1-2 in a junkyard while wrapped.... and they looked fine.

Of course all of the bolts turned to dust if you looked at them weird, so whatever.

Drew

 

What were Banks up-pipes made out of?