yea here is a pic i painted them yesterday



They are going in the car this saturday or monday so they'll be in there by wed.

 

What paint did you use? How did you prep them? Do the pot holders mean you baked them after painting?

 

i painted them using ceramic engine enamal i mean if it can take the blocks heat directly it'll hold the exhaust heat just fine

for prep i removed the base black they had used header primer black baked it for 10 mins at 380 then let cool for 4 hours then sprayed on the chrysler red color you see in the pic baked using same heat for 15 mins. if you are gonna do this don't worry bout the smoke it is some of the paint dripping down and hitting the oven which instantly dries it and makes it next to impossible to remove from oven {goo gone works barely} then yea the oven mits are there cause i used them cause they are like 380 degrees I'm having them installed i'll keep you up to date on how they hold up over the winter

also has anyone heard of jet coating headers my friend says it is even better then ceramic coated headers but i've never heard of them

 

"Jet Hot" is a brand of of ceramic coating, arguably the premere suppliers (certainly one of the first) of this product. Its durability is unbeatable.

Our board is sponsored by another supplier of ceramic coating, ACS (button above).

 

Unfortunatly, the exhaust temp is not regulated by a thermostat.

 

All that work just for it to all come off when you start the engine.

 

I've never heard of "ceramic engine enamel". Thought I'd let this one age a little before commenting.

The block is much, much cooler than the exhaust, I'm afraid.

Might want to start it up outside the garage the first time you fire it up.

 

Deff. take some pic's befor you start it up. because like everyone else has said Its prob going to burn wight off.

Oh a side not If you do want RED headers I can offer you a true ceramic coating in Red, blue or regular silver..

Its not a vibrant red as your paint is but at least it is specifically made for headers.

 

ok well i should get the car back today or saturday by the latest. And then i'll tell you guys how it has held up

 

That is the same type of paint I used on my TES headers a few years ago and it did NOT just burn right off like some of you claim... The product I used was made by Duplicolor and was rated to 1500* F .

I stripped them down to bare metal as best I could with basic washing and hand tools. The areas where they were indeed down to bare metal still have paint sticking to them to this day! The areas where they had some surface rust or I didn't get all of the dirt and old paint off them ended up peeling some but even there the paint stuck pretty well. And I didn't bake them either... Baking should help it even more.

Here's a pic of the engine about 6 months after they were installed:



They did dull quite a bit compared to what the paint looked like when it was freshly applied however....

 

i used that same stuff on my headers and i would say it lasted.... at the max.... 2 minutes then it started smokin like all h e l l. i had to let it idle for about 2 hours until it finally stopped smokin. i would recommend having someone coat the headers for you professionaly.

 

Hmmm.... Still have lots of paint on them as we speak! Something tells me some of you need some lessons in prep work .



A professional coating job it is not, but I would say for the $5 or so the can of paint costs it does a bang-up job .

 

Yep...

 

i guess i should of had you do mine ....... cause mine deffinately didn't turn out that well. oh well you live you learn, guess i should of cleaned the surface better

 

ok well all that prep work and stuff DID NOT pay off 3 seconds after being started they started smoking i thought ok maybe just a little will burn off you know but WHOOOSH 9 mins after it was alll black smoke billowing out of the engine bay should of realized it when it was smoking while baking that it wouldn't hold up

 

sounds familiar

 

yep, did the same thing on my 86. I used 1 can for each header, looked beautiful when i was done. 5 minutes after startup it was all gone in a puff....actually a billowing(sp) cloud of smoke.

mental note:
the 91 gets coated headers

 

did ya'll sand the headers like you're supposed to? i haven't had any problems with mine.

 

Spray on header paint is pretty much worthless. After the smoke stopped, they were okay for about two weeks. Then the paint started to flake off in the spots where rapid cooling happens (from water on the road)


Yeah they looked great then.

 

how were those fumes when you painted in your house? any animals survive? ? i painted misc. bolts and baked them in the oven and damn it stunk but the paint has held and even when wrenching on them.

 

OK, to sum up this thread:

1. If you want a durable finish that lasts a long time, painting headers is not the place to look

2. If you prep the headers properly, painting them can look decent and last fairly well

3. If you do not prep headers and paint them, the paint comes of rapidly and smokes a lot.

4. No matter what, coating is better overall as it has thermal insulating properties that paint does not have.

5. Painting costs about 1/20th as much as professional coating

6. When you pay for professional coating, part of that cost IS THE PREP WORK (hint hint)

K, that's enough for now....lol

 

It got me really really high... that's my bedroom believe it or not. Messy at the time but yeah the paint is decent. The headers are still covered in it but like I said, it's flaking where water hits it (rapid cooling)

 

I've used the DEI 1500 degree aluminum paint from Summit on two sets.

For the Camaro, I removed the shipping paint with laquer thinner, painted, & baked in the kitchen oven (took all the pets out of the house, opened all the windows, took the family out to dinner). The y-pipe was too big to fit in the window, so I installed it raw and tried an in-place cure: Started the engine for a minute, shut it down, let it cool, started for a couple of minutes, etc. The y-pipe has taken the worst of it, showing surface rust but not pits or large loss of paint. The headers still look pretty decent, no substantial rust except at the collector flange. That was in Nov '01.

I did the '57 this spring. They were several years old, so I sand blasted & wiped them down with thinner before painting. They're too large to fit in the oven, so I hung them from the garage rafters and took a couple of propane torches to them, heating from the inside first then the outside. A few spots have chipped off, but overall they still look decent. I'll probably take them off this winter to fix up some flange leakage, I'll either touch up the paint or go ahead and have them coated.

Here's what they looked like after I bolted them in in April. I have another photo taken in July that doesn't show that same angle, but what you can see looks the same.

 

go with a jet hot coating or try our new sponcer might be cheaper.

 

Dont go with Jet Hot.. Its a 50/50 shot with them.. Personally I had a set of headers go bad from them. Thats why I got into Coatings myself. I do ceramic,thermal and powder coatings.

but Ive had buddies who had headers done by jet hot an dthey are still fine.. so go figure. Its all in the prep work.