355 Fabspeed Header Coating

Likely, but that's more a function of application. Bright ceramic is bright ceramic. If you don't see any green or black base coat on the ID then its bright.

If you're coater legitimately coated 100% of the tubes this is accomplished by dragging a special sprayer through the tubes, pulling a rag or sponge through them or actually filling / pouring material through them, all of which will result in a much more uneven appearance.

This material is very sensitive to application pressure and temperature. Although the application on yours seems to be pretty good overall you can see the excessive orange peel in and around the fabspeed logo is representative of poor atomization.
Sprayed properly this material should have a smooth and shiny appearance much like chrome. Which it appears some of the other tubes do.
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Fabspeed's ceramic coating vendor told me that the inside dull coating is to trap the heat, and the outside coating is mainly for appearance and protection from superficial damage.

I thought pipes are dunked into liquid to coat the inside completely?

 

LOL, lucky for you that's not the case. Unless your mystery coater is NASA, he's using one of a dozen varieties of this material. For sake of this conversation, pretty much ALL of the ceramic metallic coatings function pretty much the same. I've only been working with them for 15+ years, so I'm vaguely familiar.

if its smooth and polished correctly it will shine much brighter. The "shiny part" of the coating is a thin layer of aluminum, so by definition it will polish. This is also the weakest link when exposed to excessive temps. Just like any other uncoated aluminum it oxidizes. Or in this case if they are freshly done they likely haven't been cleaned sufficiently. Rub your finger or a white cloth across a pipe and it will turn black.

Your coater should have told you to do this for maintenance anyway, but if you want to see how bright it actually gets, you can use pretty much any aluminum polish. Ideally a non abrasive liquid polish like Flitz or Maguiers. Take a terry cloth type rag and rub a little on any of your pipes. It doesn't take much pressure. The rag willy be covered in black residue and the pipe will be significantly brighter.

Again like chrome work, the shine and reflection is only as good as the polishing behind it. A smooth part will reflect more than a textured part....... Either way, if you polish your pipes before installation it will protect them from oxidizing as quickly and make them really shine. You can also polish out some of the "dullness" brought on by the temps but this is fruitless in that they will just dull again if your temps are such to cause it in the first place. Even under prefect tuning conditions its normal for this coating to dull "slightly" the first 4-10 inches of your primaries.

 

The only reason the ID of the pipe doesn't look as good as the outside is because the ceramic media used to burnish / polish the material gets compacted in the pipes and can't really move freely to polish them. That is true with tight areas of the headers like the collector as well. The media dead heads around id and it can't really roll around freely like it needs to.

When these pipes are coated and baked they look NOTHING like they do now. They start off as a whitish / gray color with a slight porous texture. Once they are burnished / polished they take on the chrome like appearance. Which essentially is the polished aluminum skin. This is why you will see frosted white spots in all the nooks and crannies and low spots of the orange peel. These areas are too small for the polishing media to drop down in and polish them. This isn't a big deal on SS pipes, but those are areas that will rust on mild steel pipes. Also, minor spots like this can be polished easily by hand.

 

Who coated them?

 

Are you saying that it's impossible to have different coatings on the inside vs. the outside, and/or Watson and I are being lied to or misled?

Let us know, we want our bang for our 400 bucks.

 

Its absolutely possible to have different coatings on the inside and outside of your exhaust and I've never stated anything to the contrary.

With regards to Watsons headers and the ID pics he posted, the visible coating on the ID and OD of his headers are identical. Its a standard metallic ceramic. NOW, its "possible" to have another coating under the bright coating we're seeing in the pic. But those coatings would be a high temp thermal barrier which are light army green color or possibly a black which are variants of the bright ceramic "less" the aluminum skin which allows them to handle 2000F+. You can't stack a bright coating on a bright coat without blasting the base coat properly for adhesion. Therefore you couldn't blast another bright ID coating to stack on another. It would be a complete waste of time and you'd have huge chunks of ceramic in your CATs in short order.

So unless my eyes are deceiving me I see ZERO trace of any other color or a build up of material that would indicate otherwise inside the header. ID coatings are far from perfect so inevitably something is visible. Further, the mystery "coater" said he put a 1500F inner coating. The bright ceramic is on the exterior is rated at 1300F-1700F EGT already. Whats the point? Not to mention as I've stated several times these bright ceramics are all rated the same.

Several things to know, most ceramic coaters DON'T coat the ID of headers. Jet Hot said they did for years and all they did was spray in the headers as far as the average Joe could see. They "did" spray the ID of the header, but they didn't spray 100% of it like most people assume so technically they didn't lie. We've cut headers apart before and you can clearly see where the ceramic stops about a foot or so in the collector.

Now the other 5% of coaters that actually DO coat all of the header tubes almost always use the same bright ceramic material as opposed to a different thermal barrier. If they do it's quite obvious.

I've got some pics of the ID of a collector like the ones posted that merely have the same bright ceramic on them and I think they will look IDENTICAL to the ones posted. I've got 1000's of pics I just need to figure out where they are, lol.....

 

Ok. Here is a header that could easily be passed off as having been coated with a top secret ID coating and a Special shiny outer coating, lol. Its the same identical finish inside and out and it has NOT been coated all the way through. You wouldn't know by looking inside though.

This looks, I would dare say identical to the posted pic aside from the fact that the header has been polished better on the OD which apparently was previously unheard of........ You can even see some residual polishing media in the collector....
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Just wanted to jump in here and speak on what exactly you are getting when you get headers ceramic coated through FABSPEED, despite what has been said or assumed by 3rd parties.

While I may not have all the answers, if there is a specific question you have - I would be happy to get the answer from our coating company.

Our headers are coated both inside and outside. There is a slight difference between the materials used inside and outside.

Our silver coating is good for protection up to roughly 1500 degrees and the black coating is good for protection up to 1800 degrees.

The ceramic coat is applied via spray to the exterior of the part. Items such as headers that have hard to reach interiors are covered using a device called a "Flo Coat". The tool spins as it is snaked through the header tubes so that adequate coverage is applied across all 360 degrees of the interior walls.

 

How is that any different from what has been said? Your coater is using a bright ceramic on both the ID and OD your headers in those that are coated with bright ceramic.

Also, "flo-coating" is a "process", not a device. It's done one of two different ways, most commonly with a spray gun with a flexible hose that has a 360 degree spray pattern that is dragged through each primary tube or two, ceramic material is actually poured through each tube, hence "flo-coating"........

 

Thanks for the update. Again, we manufacture the exhaust, the coating is performed by a third party, so If my wording was incorrect, please forgive me.

 

This is a very informative post...thanks for sharing your knowledge.

 

I agree. It was very interesting.

 

Hi All I'm sitting here reading all these Geniuses talking about ceramic coating on Fab speed headers I happen to be one of the foremost experts in the world on the Ferrari 355 and header coatings and applications and let me set the record straight for Joe from Fabspeed and all of You -if you have Fab speed headers you get more chicks!! You will have to fight them OFF!!!
Whatever the price by them they're worth it!!