I like mine with jalapenos, onion and fat back.

I take it that you don't like their Chromex finish?

My headers and mufflers are holding up fine. They do require a "breakin" of sorts; don't want to hit them with max heat from the jump. There are specific instructions and, if followed, a couple of heat cycles will make a difference. Not high mileage yet but I expect they will continue to hold up; there is not hint of discoloration and I don' run the heat shields. The only thing I don't like about them is that the coating is not impervious to damage from road debris, etc. and you can't really repair those scratches. One oif the things I do like about them is that if you should burn off some boot sole or some other gear that comes in contact with a hot pipe, when the pipe cools you can just ball it up and roll it off.

 

I may compromise and use a less than chrome finish, push comes to shove I'll take performance over apearance. I'm curious to see how your stuff holds up. I was real happy with the Swain Tech till it failed, it was supposed to be good to 3000, your chromex is good to 1300. I have to assume it will fail also. I don't know whether to start doin some research or just roll the dice and try the next brand, since my last research effort turned out to be a waste of time.

 

Call the Performance Coating guys; they are down to earth and no BS. I have my top end apart right now, parts ordered and it will be a few more weeks before that one is up and running again. If the Chromex is truly good to 13000, it will hold up. Mine are Satin Titanium and supposed to be good to 2000; we shall see.

 

We have found values in various coatings over the years on our racebike's and racecars, enough that we started offering Ceramic coatings on our Jackpot stainless head pipes this season. We are doing separate internal/external coatings as there are actually different coating requirements for material subjected directly to the exhaust stream vs. external surfaces, and the pipes actually go thru 9 different phases during the coating process. The coating helps retain energy in the form of heat in the exhaust stream instead of absorbing it into the exhaust pipe. Besides exhaust pipe temp reduction the main performance benefits are due to the parasitic effect of the radiant heat to the surrounding components. Lower heat is better, and a key to optimum performance.

Stepping headers is a essentially a "tuning strategy" for exhaust pipes. You really need to look at the overall design of the exhaust system as well as the engine itself. True duals aside for a moment, while most are fixated on the steps of a 2/1 or 2/1/2 system by far the most critical component is the collector, as this is the major determining factor on how the system will scavenge. Once you have the collector design in place which can vary greatly in overall size and degree of entry/exit taper you will need to interpret what will work best for the primaries. You want to keep velocity at its highest which laws of physics tells us use the smallest pipe possible. Stepping comes into play and can work especially well (or is required) if the collector or muffler does not allow the primary to maintain a given velocity, we then step the primary to decrease the area itself to make up for this deficiency. Generally speaking a well designed system does not need to be stepped as long as the muffler, collector and primaries are designed for a given application. With that said there are certainly well designed stepped systems that work very well. True duals on the other hand can generally benefit very well from stepped head pipes because they do not have any collector at all and all of the scavenging is done with the muffler and up the pipe itself. This is terrible for velocity and the reason many see a loss of low end performance, stepping the primaries on a true dual system can help raise velocity and in turn low end performance. Hope this info helps.

 

On my prior Kawasaki 1600 Mean Streak I had a Muzzy 2-1 stainless steel meg exhaust system installed (expertly tuned by Jamie BTW). I got a hair brained idea to get the headers coated inside/out and sent them off to a popular coater in Sheboygan (WI). They looked so cool I left the heat shields off but they did gray up at the heads. Coater said to send them back for a re-do and same results happened. I just put back on the heat shields and kept as is. As far as external heat, I could tell no difference but probably had more to do with exhaust style/configuration. I know I won't spend any extra $$ to do it on my FLHT if they don't come with it ....

 

It was on ICE, it was in the 90s it was a bored over 680 ultra polaris, I thought the same as you that it would fatten it up, and be a dog, the thing ran awesome for about 600 yards, then buuuururrrrr done...the piston was burned on the exhaust side, I had the inside of the pipes stripped , it was all good after that, I should have just jetted it, and ran it.
My thoughts at the time is it slicked up the pipes making the exhaust gases faster , but I never found out as I got scared, and had it stripped.

 

Lowering peak RPMs on a sled is different because of the clutch system, I changed nothing but the coating on the inside of the pipes ,and peak rpms were lower, I can not explain it, I had the tac marked for racing, so I could know at a quick glance what the motor was doing, it was at least 400 rpm lower.

 

The coating on the pipes doesn't change what rpm the bike runs at at a given speed. The only way you'll accomplish that is by changing gearing. There's a mechanical link between the crankshaft and the rear wheel. Change the transmission, primary, or final drive gearing and you'll change the ratio of rpm/speed. Change the coating on or in the pipe, all you'll get is a cooler pipe.

 

Ryan from Rush, and Jamie, thanks for your expert explanations. Your two posts in particular made sense out of all of this.

The best thing about these forums, imo, is gaining knowlege before a new bike purchase, and being able to deal with the known problems immediately, with the best results.