header wrap

just wondering if header wrap has any benefits or negatives. i am planning on wrapping the pipes on my bobber project. i would like to know if there are any reasons not to do it.

The wrap will trap water, and cause your pipes to rust out quicker than would normally. They can be very difficult to wrap,especially where clearances are tight.

Rusting the pipes and it will make the engine run a bit hotter since it reduces heat transfer out the pipes. The "performance gains" (if there are any) are because it traps heat and keeps the exhaust gas hotter, hotter gas flows faster because it's less dense. I recall in the stone age we wrapped the header pipes to the turbine on turbo Corvair engines and it supposedly gave them a few extra horses. I doubt they do anything on a bike engine. On bikes it's just for looks and to hide ugly pitted pipes.

I sand blasted and wrapped mine, but because they were ugly, rusted and had holes in the pipes. If you want your pipes to look uniform but lack the funds for new nice pipes right now than I say do it. It is good visual bang for the buck. I used fiber glass wrap.....dont use fiber glass wrap.....it hurts even when you wear latex gloves. Definitely wet the wrap when you put it on. Makes it easy to stretch and shrinks real nice and tight when dry.

These are mine on the work in progress...dont judge the seat...Im redoing it

I had mine wrapped and liked the look. A friend of mine explained to me the due to the heat trapped inside he has seen headers crumble into dust. I really don't know. I used rustolium high temp paint to protect them from rust. My personal issue with them is that they looked awesome until I hit my first wet road with them. Without thinking it through I hit them with a power washer and it cut right through them. I opted to remove the tattered wrap and redo mine with ceramic powder coat this winter when I powder coat the frame.

Why do you think you need to raise the temperature of the exhaust system? I doubt very much that that the primaries are too small for the bike.

If it was me i wouldnt wrap the headers. Like stated these are air cooled bikes. You want heat transfer. Now when your talking turbos or diesels, Then i could see wraping the pipes.

Wrapped mine, no issues at all so far. Just make sure you dry it out properly if you use it. I wrapped my pipes OFF the bike & work from back to front (so the edges of the overlap face back). I used a hot air gun to dry them out by blowing the air through the pipe

On cars, especially with turbo's, we wrap the headers to keep the heat from radiating so much inside the engine bay. Which can help it run cooler, and keep your air intake a little cooler if you're pulling from inside the engine bay.
But that's all on stuff with hoods, since it's all exposed to open air on a bike anyways, it loses that functionality as the heat doesn't get trapped under the hood. and yea, since it's all air cooled, keeping them unwrapped should actually help them cool everything faster on a bike by giving you more surface area for the "cold" outside air to go over. So for bikes, I'll say the wrap is just aesthetic, I think it looks better than ratty rusted out pipes, but I wouldn't put it on a nice set.

thanks for the input. these pipes are pretty much missing the chrome and are for sure rusty and pitted.

gcarson64 wrote: thanks for the input. these pipes are pretty much missing the chrome and are for sure rusty and pitted.

I can appreciate why you wrapped them. Mine are not the prettiest headers either but they will powder coat just fine. If mine were in poor condition I would wrap them before I replaced them. I'm cheap.