Exhaust Header Secrets: What to Look For

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I think $350 for ceramic coating is cheap heat control vs cooking all of your plastic and rubber vacuum hoses. Headers will radiate much more heat into the engine bay and passenger compartment and cause heat soak. I got the ceramic coating on my Stainless works headers and do not regret one bit spending the extra $$ for it.

If you having underhood temp issues, it can effect things like sensors and wiring in the engine bay. If ceramic coating is gonna but temps down by 50%, you're saving yourself a lot of headaches from replacing sensors.

The cone you speak of in the collector, makes it a "merge collector" just in case you wanted to know the correct terminology.

I have built 30-35 sets of headers in the last 30 years, including piston aircraft, 2/3 of which were stainless. From my experience there are only 2 types of SS to use in header construction. 304 and 321 the ladder being used in high output turbo applications or in a thinner wall for high end, normally aspirated. 304 is fine for street turbo applications that dont see extended high rpm high load operation. The ideal use imo of ceramic coating is to use it on the inside only of a stainless header which retains the SS look but increases thermal efficiency while reducing discoloration in gasoline applications. Another thing to look for in ss header construction is if the manufacturer purged or used flux on the back side of the weld. The way to tell is if there are signs of carbide precipitation on the back of the weld which is black in color. Shiny on the inside means it was done correctly. Carbide precipitation can lead to a 30% reduction in weld strength leading to cracks. Silicon bronze is the name of the tig rod used to weld outside of the flange on a steel header. There is a black ceramic coat that looks better over time and less prone to rust imo on a steal header. Other good points in the video

Regarding Hot Rod’s Ceramic Coating article, it should be noted that they ran the test on an engine dyno. Had the engine been in a car on a rear wheel dyno with the hood closed you may have seen a hp difference, especially in modern vehicles where the computer pulls timing due to elevated iat’s.

That silicon bronze you talked about when headers is actually just a more proper tig weld. Tig welds “should” be silver to straw colored on stainless. Rainbows are actually corrosion. Food grade stuff is even more strict

Something to consider with equal length headers is firing order of your specific v8. There are engines for which an equal length header is not the best. Check it out and you'll see what I mean. On the topic of material and ceramic coating and rust... Any metal with high iron content can be passivated using phosphoric acid. Iron will oxidize eventually if exposed to oxygen no matter what. But oxidized iron can be converted from iron oxide to iron phosphate. The iron phosphate layer can prevent deeper structural iron from being exposed to oxygen. The header should be boiled to promote a flash oxidation layer to give the phospho something to convert and thus build a thicher iron phosphate layer. Ceramic coating is something most people can do at home. It's worth the price of a set of headers to know how to do. Great video man. Keep em coming. P.S. might consider teaching that matching the header to the intake and cams shaft is the key to making good power. A stock engine can actually lose power by adding a header designed for racing applications. Also, the diameter of the runner affects pulse timing. A smaller diameter will accelerate the exhaust gas and a large diameter will slow it down. The reason this matters is at what rpm do you want max torque. If the intake is designed for peak torque at 3000 rpm and the header for 7000 rpm... well you can see what's up. They will be working against each other. Then the cam shaft enters the chat, lol!

I agree with your ceramic vs. 304 stainless steel argument. Personally, I'm a sucker for DEI exhaust wraps, but late models barely leave any space for them. Thanks for the video.

From 0:48 to 0:58 you used my video on Speed Engineering Headers, im flattered <3

I really like this video, super helpful to people trying to get into cars without scaring us away

saw a demo on u tube , measuring temp from a coated header and a non coated .the non coated 500 degrees hotter than the ceramic coated header .

An extra bit of info on 4 into 1 vs tri-y headers is ground clearance. This holds true for lowered cars and cars that weren't designed for modification. I had 4 into 1 Blackjack headers on my Delta 88 and the collectors scraped every speed bump they could find. Eventually I had custom made Tri-Y headers installed and no more problems.

one extra thing we do at work that wasn't listed here is to hammer the inside of the tube inside every flange to close the gaps and the clean the inside edges with a linisher thing in a die grinder (don't know what they are actually called) and smooth the mating surface of the flange with a flap disc but like you mentioned with headers we face them off on a linisher and they come out really neat

I believe ceramic coating only affects performance when its applied internally, usually on N/A applications, but its only effective if you build your entire setup around this feature and carry it through most of the exhaust as well as tuning it for this feature

Not as detailed as I expected but, gives a clear idea about the basics. Good video.

Good video. Covered a lot without making it confusing. Glad you explained equal length but most of your examples weren't.

Great advice and I totally agree with you Sport Tuned 304 headers are what I would be looking for!... The problem with many of the new Engines of today is that they have aluminum heads that are well designed, but end up breaking bolts because they have cast iron manifolds as stock to preserve heat (big heat/thaw difference)!... 304 Stainless Sport Tuned Headers I believe will solve much of those problems from breaking header bolts, but at a cost of changing out your thermostat to a little later opening with keeping the heat! There is always a heat distribution change on the aluminum heads and changing out the head bolts to something that will accommodate the heat exchange (heat/thaw) is also a great interest as well! Why many companies decide to go with cast iron manifolds is because of the cheap price! Great article!

Pretty much everything you put it out is why I got Kooks exhaust for my 2006 6.0L GTO

On more modern cars with cats, ceramic coating has one more benefit, heating the cats up faster and possibly to a higher temperature, allowing the exhaust to be a bit cleaner. I bought ceramic coated shorty headers for my truck primarily because of under hood temperatures and never wanting to deal with warped headers and broken header bolts ever again. And although everybody who knows more about engines than I do keep telling me that headers do not increase torque that much, it still seems to me, that compared to a ticking exhaust manifold, it now has more off-idle torque and revs more freely than before. But it is a 230hp 3ton truck so I could be wrong.