I bought a ST1300 for the street. It throws a lot of heat on the rider, mostly because the valve cover side vents of the fairing vent right onto your shins. Some people have wrapped the pipes with some success. I'm thinking of doing the same. I was wondering if this would cause problems to the exhaust, like cracking them or something. Any thoughts?
re: header wrap Ideally, you'll remove the exhaust, and send it to HPC to have it cermic coated, inside and out. if you ceramic coat (or use header wrap) it's kind of bad for hp...and the pipes get a LOT hotter. I have bad header wrap experience from our 1996 Virginia Tech Formula SAE car "MEAT" (she was ~100 lb heavier than competition back then, hence the name, a product of not finishing endurance for the past 3 years so the factor of safety on most everything was too high=too heavy!) back to the HP part of it. if you header wrap, it's like putting your pipes in an oven. all that thermal energy that's supposed to stay in the hot gases so they have more energy and leave the exhaust faster and thereby scavenge better is somewhat wasted by heating the headers up to REALLY HOT. Ceramic coating is much better, but i only think a lot better if you get the pipes done inside and outside. expcet a few % more hp perhaps. your pipes stay a lot cooler, as do your shins. most of the heat energy is reflected by the ceramics inside the pipes back into the exhaust gases that decide that getting the F out of the way of the next cylinders' pulse is the right idea, hence you'll get better scavenging. bad experience w/ header wrap. [ok, we were running a CBR600F3 motor simulating the endurance event which is ~1/2 hr with both drivers running, and we had leaned the turbocharged motor out a bit to make sure it would have enough fuel in the tank for the whole thing.] anyhow, we had a stupid designed log exhaust similar to that on a locomotive, the end of the log went into a 1.75" or so pipe that fed the garrett GT15 that was behind the engine. the pipe go so hot it was glowing orange hot and sagged so that the alternator cover dented it a bit. we went to competition that way and ended up getting 3rd in dynamic events, 5th overall, but i didn't like our engine package. oh yeah, one more thing...when i stayed at tech in teh summer we took the car apart to fix some stuff after competition. Matt stupidly used aluminum to make a gasket between the turbine and exhaust pipe. well, it got so hot that it melted, and let's just say the turbine wheel wasn't the most efficient it could be! granted, the turbo still worked, but the molten AL had taken off the outside corners of the turbine wheel. if u want to see the car... December 1996 Car & Driver in the article about our friend's team entitled "R.I.T. Kisses it's Sister" (named so because they got 2nd place for the 2nd or 3rd year in a row to UTA.) your header will corrode a lot faster too due to the elevated temps. don't think ours ever cracked, but it sure could have!
I've done header wrap and ceramic coat. The header wrap works better IMO to keep things around the pipe cooler - like oil lines and such. It stinks to high heaven though.
DEI engineering sells really nice clamps specifically for header wrap. They won't corrode over time like hose clamps wil and they have a lot more holding power than safety wire. I like to use their black wrap, too. It's not as ugly as the cream colored wrap that most companies sell.
