I am switching out my exhaust manifold, and the new one has the heat shield mounting holes(bottom shield near cat) in different locations, so I can't re-use the same shield. Is this part necessary, would I be able to use some heat wrap in the same location to get the same effect? I have read about wrapping a header can cause it to crack, but I'm thinking about just applying it to one side(to protect the radiator and fans)

 

you don't need to wrap it. Your engine bay will just have more heat soak then others.

 

im using my stock exhaust manifold with no heat shield. i do notice it gets a lot hotter. and it smells like burnt toast!

is this common with aftermarket headers also??

 

ive been running without mine for over a year, no problems.

 

shouldn't give you any problems but it does help keep the heat down.

 

i'm guessing that you probably got megan racing headers, you can't put your stock heat sheild on aftermarket headers unless you modify it but then if you go back to stock you will be screwed since you have to cut a part of the heat sheild. just leave it alone because it won't harm the car.

 

But do you guys get what smell I'm talking about?

 

nope but weird how your getting an odd smell with stock headers.

 

if your getting a smell it could just be that you touched it while messing around in the bay, its just your fingerprints burning off and should disappear pretty quickly.

 

I guess. I've been polishing it so that might explain it. Smells like an old skool heater. When it gets really hot. Hope it stops soon

 

why are you tring to polish it and is it even working?

 

Its working fine. I just took off the heatshield and didn't like the rusted up pipes. I already polished my valve cover and thought this would go great together without me having to get an aftermarket header and have all that rasp...

 

haha yeah with that trd exhaust it'd be really raspy.

 

Yup. So this way it still looks good without sacrificing all that sound.

 

works fine, here is my stock one polished too



and if your getting a smell it might be the rubbing compound or whatever you used to polish the header, whipe it with some alcohol and the smell should be gone, thats what I had to do.

 

thats what min look like
did you rub it with alcohol after you polished it? did it ruin the finish at all?

 

no i polished it and it started smoking and smelling, so then i applied alcohol and the smell and somke went away

 

Wow, talk about a threadjack, LOL. Anyways thanks for the input, I ditched the heatshield and had no problems. I wasn't getting any emails that there were responses to this thread, must've been because of the site issues.