So tonight after a particularly spirited drive home (around 3 miles in 4 minutes, familiar side streets, early morning, etc.) I parked in the driveway and got out, noticed a burning smell. At first I thought it was my tires, realized that it didn't smell at all like rubber burning, then I popped the hood and saw my headers glowing faintly orange through the heat shield.

Car has ~41k miles, just changed oil, no engine light, entirely stock engine (no I/H/E, nothing.) What would cause the headers to glow and what can I do about this?

 

holy ____, wow that's really only normal if you have forced induction. you may have a restriction in your baffles or cat.

hows your coolant and what was the temp reading?

 

last i heard of sumthing like that happening there engine magically blew....


jk

 

thats not funny Fab.

 

your cat could be gettign plugged up,causeing excess heat build up.

 

Damn

 

COMPLETELY NORMAL for lead footing it at low speed. My BMW motorcycle R100S 1978 will make the headers pipes glow at idle if you just look at them in the dark. That's why turbos have to cool down too.

 

1.) thats not completely normal
2.) how the hell can you lead foot at low speeds?

like others said, might be a clogged cat.

 

I haven't seen that before, so... any pics?

 

What they don't have red lights at corners in IL?? Gas and Brake without a lot of air flow into the engine compartment will generate a lot of header heat. Idle burns about 0.3 gallons an hour or less, heavy thorttle about 5 gallons an hour = a lot of BTUs coming out the engine head and down the header. Ever see a engine run with no header pipe on the exhaust ports? Even at idle there spits out blue flame on every exhaust stroke, my v-twin 500cc Moto Morini would spit out about a 3 inch long flame from the heads with a nice loud crack crack crack whoooo boy was it loud. Without lots of air cooling i.e. header in the front of the engine - they get really hot and in boats they actually water cool them since there is no air flow to keep them cool below deck.

 

so im to understand that he was running his motor past 3 grand constantly in stop and go traffic. go see a mechanic or wait and find out if your engine will be ok. either way its your choice.

"so today i like totally decided to leave my car in first gear all day, including the freeway.... it was rad"

if it were me i would use the better part of my judgment and ask around... i rod the hell out of my tc with and without stock headers. and never ever had that happen.... not once.


lol

 

Well have a look at your headers after some hard driving and make sure you are in the dark. Is the oil filter near the headers on a tC or did any oil get on the heat shield after the oil change?

 

Ok... thanks for the replies, everyone.

I was doing perhaps 50-60 most of the way so the problem wasn't the lack of cooling. I have sufficient coolant and the heat gauges showed nothing out of the ordinary. The oil filter is on the other side of the engine and I didn't spill any while doing the change.

When I googled this particular issue, what came up was primarily forum posts about old Camaros, and what everyone seemed to be saying about that was that either their ignition timing was too advanced, causing the unburnt mixture to enter the headers, or that they were running too lean. Since the tC can't be manually adjusted because the ECU handles all that, I figured resetting my ECU would probably deal with both of those issues, so I disconnected the battery for 10 minutes or so. Since then I haven't seen anything glow, although I haven't exactly tried to reproduce the issue. I'll see if I can make it happen again in a couple of nights, when I can be sure nobody's on the road. If I can, I'll upload some pics.

 

Usually it is more a problem when the ignition is retarrded and the gas mixture is still burning when the exhaust valve opens up. I once saw a welding/generator get its cast iron exhaust manifold cherry red because of retarded timing. And that as in an open garage in daylight.

 

good thought on resetting the ecu.