About a year ago I went to the drag strip and was racing my Explorer. There was another guy there with one who was also racing his. We obviously started talking and I noticed he was always spraying down underneath the intake manifold with ice water after and before a run. This was when I was still a noob, LOL. He told me there is a coolant pipe that the intake manifold straddles and just bakes that manifold in heat. I was surprised and intrigued and decided to do something a little better about it.
I went to Tasca Parts and bought a new pipe to keep downtime to a minimum as I already had purchased a new intake manifold for my direct port meth kit I was going to install. So when I got the pipe in, first thing I did was send it off to Jet Hot Coatings to get a ceramic coating treatment:
I was advised by Jet Hot that their classic polish would accomplish what I’m after better than any of their other offerings based on what it was being used for.
Well, I thought I had done the pinnacle in heat management, but boy was I wrong. After seeing a post by @mrhighcaliber, I was impressed by the steps he took to mitigate the heat from this hot coolant pipe. So much so, that I had to copy him, so all credit goes to him for this one.
Got some 1″ rubber pipe insulation from Home Depot.
You have to get the rubber, not the foam, it won’t hold up to the heat. Well one step further it was wrapped in some metal heat tape. I had some of that fancy gold stuff from DEI laying around so I decided to use that for me:
So, FYI, there is a technique to wrapping pipe with heat tape. You can’t just do it continuously. I made that mistake and it looked like shit. The secret is cutting it into strips. I watched this video and it all made sense to me. And looks great.
I did no real datalogging before this and I’ve done so many other mods at thee same time I did this, there’s no real way for me to say how well, if at all, it’s gonna work. But logic says it will at least do something, LOL. And that’s enough for me. Plus it looks kinda cool.