Need opinions, I want to either powder coat or heat wrap my cold air intake and hot side charge pipe. I was thinking that heat wrapping (just header wrap or header wrap over the silver sticky-backed tape) would lower the intake air temperature. Has anyone done this and seen a drop in temperature? Is it worth the trouble and somewhat shoddy appearance?

Either that or was thinking of going bright red powder coat on the pipes and flat black on the valve cover. '08 Victory Red SS/TC

Thanks for any input!

 

dk, but i lovvvveeee my red charge pipes

 

If you have CAI, why bother? Besides, 1) With a turbo it's the charged air temp that really *counts* and 2) Even if your intake pipe is heated up some, the TIME the air spends in there is extremely BRIEF, so it isn't going to be effected much by external intake pipe temps.

 

i wrap both my short ram and charge pipe with heat wrap.

 

This seems to make sense, but by the same token, what's the point of having an intercooler? Yes any one air particle will only spend a brief amount of time in the system, but a large volume of air will spend much longer.

I'm leaning towards wrapping the pipes with heat shield and then some cheap header tape for a meaner look. It definitely won't look as sharp as a powdercoat job, but are we talking about a noticeable power gain here? I heard that for every 10deg you drop your IAT you get about 5% more power at the flywheel, living in south Florida I need all the help I can get!

 

What does it hurt is the question?

 

I said..it's the CHARGED AIR that counts..IC>>>CHARGED AIR. Charged air HEATS UP and that's what the motor finally gets to see. Intake>>>atmospheric air....not as critical in the Turbo car, since it gets HEATED post turbo. BTW..ya can't begin to compare the heat transfer characteristics of an IC compared to an INTAKE PIPE!
I'm not knocking tryn use cooler intake air..sure it helps some. But wrapping the PIPE to shield it from heating up still won't accomplish anything in keeping the intake air cooler. You want cool air TO ENTER THE INTAKE, forget about trying to cool it further while it RUSHES through that short pipe. Like I said, that air isn't spending much time in there..what 1/10 sec? Hey, go ahead....certainly can't hurt, but don't expect any performance gains. If you did, you'd see a hell of a lot more people doing it.

 

So... Just heat wrap the hot pipe? haha.. Then the question is, is the air in the hot pipe roughly the same, greater than, or cooler than the ambient under-hood temperature? To me I think they would be around the same and heat wrap wouldn't make much of a difference, heck, it might even trap in some of the heat if the charged air were hotter!

If it is just the charged side air that matters, I might as well just go ahead with my original plans of powdercoating...