I bought exhaust wrap on ebay from a reputable guy last week. It came in the mail today. I want to use it on my headers to keep the heat from them out of the engine bay for summertime. My car is all stock besides a drop in K&N air filter in the air box and a new direct fit high flow cat. Can anyone tell me how to remove my header? I cant even see it from the top or bottom of the car. I like to ask questions and get details before ripping everything apart on a hunch.

If I wrapped my entire exhaust system would that be bad? I do know I want to wrap the entire catback section under my trunk. It heats it up almost to 200 degrees in there for some reason. Not sure if that is normal but it has always done that.

I bought 100 feet of 2 inch wide wrap. I was thinking, do the headers, the entire piping from front to back, leave the cat exposed unwrapped since that does need to let out heat especially and just do the under trunk chamber of the exhaust.

Any advise is appreciated guys

 

do some searching and you will discover why it is generally not a good idea to insulate that header on this motor...

 

I would advise against wrapping the exhaust. I have wrapped my full exhaust for my rear mount turbo set up. When doing this i left the header unwrapped (see above post) mine is a aftermarket tubular header. apart from my unique situation you may want to go about trying to keep the heat out by exterior shielding (yours may be missing) and not a wrap. In addition the oem header is already heat shielded.

 

Update. I was told by the exhaust shop in town heat wrapping is ok for this car. He worked for mazda for 25 years and said the type of aftermarket I have is high flow which lets exhaust go through quicker and to only wrap the header and a little bit of the pipe by the header. Otherwise by the time it gets to the rear of my car, the heat coming out of the tail pipes will definitely melt the plastic around the exhaust on the rear bumper. He also covered the same thing about the heat shield you were saying above, only to learn the stock heat shield is a super thin hollow canister that's welded around the manifold. Really has no purpose and barely does anything to shield heat. He recommended leaving that heat shield on and wrapping the shield with the wrap. This way the wrap has no chance of catching fire or really heating the rest of the exhaust up since only half of the manifold will be covered, and it will still let alot of heat out but not into the engine bay. Which is my whole point. I was also thinking of installing high speed fans like those round cage fans that people use to dry floors with on my side vents to turn on when my car is at idle.

 

Well, have fun with that project. I don't understand taking the risk of speeding up metal fatigue on the exhaust manifold and heat shield for a *possible* drop in engine bay temperatures. You will see zero difference in coolant temperatures, oil temperatures, performance, intake temperatures, or how cold the A/C is. And you won't be prolonging engine life either. I mean it's cool that you want to do stuff to your car but what's the point in this mod?