I am considering to build a carbon header wrap - well, I dont know much about carbon but I think I saw a guy with his muffler all wrapped up with carbon… So, is that possible? is yes what would I need to build one?
thanx
there are no resins I know of that will take the heat involved in header wrap. That means you will have to use the carbon bare, carbon fibre is usually made by burning a synthetic (polyester) fibre in a vacuum so it doesn’t react with oxygen. If you wrap your header with bare carbon fibres they will react with the oxygen and moisture in the air and decay quickly at temperature. You may be able to treat the bare fibres with a high temp silicone spray but that will just be temporary protection, you would have to do it almost daily.
One idea is to use the already header wrap which is a fiberglass (Kevlar too?) product and then hand wrap the dry CF over it, but for a daily driver…good luck!
For a show car…ok!
Experiment on this one idea.
A couple of things about header wraps, it keeps the heat in the header for better exhaust flow BUT will wear out / burn out a header faster!
Irwindale Speedway had me remove it from the header when I did it to my race car as they were afraid if I had an oil leak header fire, they wouldn’t be able to put the fire out as the wrap would have soaked up the oil…:rolleyes:
So I removed it from the header and wrapped from the collector to the Flow Master muffler (rules state exhaust pipe 3" max…so I use a Flow Master with 2x 2 1/2" out pipes)!
I see headers everyday that have been ruined by wrapping them. The wrap holds so much heat in the tube that it decarbonizes the steel, That means the steel reverts to being iron which is much weaker, It just falls apart.Ceramic coating the tubes is muc better, We coat the inside of teh tubes which means the heat stays in the gasses and the headers stay cooler. You coat the inside for performance, th eoutsides for looks. If your rules don’t allow coatings, we have coatings for that too and then we spray cheap header paint on top of them so they don’t show. we even have coating that live on turbo housings.
Hey Bricklin…Id be interested in hearing what you have.
then how the heck do companies make carbon silencers?? 
Silencers run a lot cooler than header pipes…
and are usually insuated by an inch or two of fiberglass sound/heat absorber.