Exhaust Wrapping

I've mentioned several times that I wished that I'd heat treated the exhaust manifold before I fitted it because (a) it's very close to lots of other stuff like fuel and brake lines, and (b) it's a bitch to get on and off.

Well, because of the work I did on the sump, I had to get it off anyway, so I figured while it was off I'd sort it out and get it insulated.

After some research, there were a couple of ways to proceed. I could wrap it in heat absorbent fibre cloth or I could get it ceramic sprayed. 

The ceramic spray is a better solution, the cloth can have gaps which means you could get a build up of heat in a spot and that could damage the exhaust. The ceramic spray also looks much better. However, the spray, if done professionally, costs £lots.

There was a hybrid solution available too. Wrap it, and then get some cheapo spray and spray it as well. Sounds like a plan to me, so after some all too familiar eBay/PayPal action, I soon had the necessary bits required.

Wrapping was fairly easy, I used two rolls in total. I'd watched some videos on how to do this, and everyone started at the top and worked their way down as you'd expect. Now, I'm not stupid, I didn't start in the middle, but it seemed more sensible to me to start at the bottom and work my way up. This way, the overlaps were layered the correct way, so if I was caught in the rain, the water wouldn't collect. Time will tell!

High Tech Spray Booth

After wrapping, I applied the spray using my custom made spray booth (cardboard box) and applied a few coats. It looked nice and I'm debating spraying the other bits of the exhaust, but that decision can be made later.

All too easy right? Well now it was time for the bit which I pondered a while over, you see, with both the wrap and the spray, you have to cure it. And that means heating it to 400C somewhere. So even if it would fit in my oven, that ain't gonna cut it.
I could cure it on the engine, run it at idle for 20mins or so is what some people suggest, but as the engine isn't running yet, that isn't an option.

Luckily there's a workshop at work, and Andy showed me the facilities. They do have a large oven, but even that won't accommodate the manifold, so was going to opt for plan B and use the hand held gas torch that's good for 800C!

Miraculously the building didn't burn down.

I took the exhaust in to work to  find that they'd built an electric kiln for a project. Some research team wants to simulate ageing of rocks or something so they'd made this booth which my exhaust would fit in.

We fired this up, it was untested, so they had no idea what temperatures it would reach. The extractors were switched on and the room started getting warm and after about a minute it was up to 130C. At this point I left because I didn't want to be in the workshop when the fire alarms went off as that could take some explaining.

Later in the morning Andy from the workshop came to see me and said that it was all done, the home made kiln had reached 480C which was well above the 400C that I needed. Sweet.

I went back down to the workshop to take a look, and we couldn't resist getting the torch on it just in case we'd missed some bits :)