My 2014 SR Viper MCX 270 project sled

[Bruce Jardine]

View attachment 154229

 

[Bruce Jardine]

I was in Chicago that week and had it shipped to my office there instead of home to Utah because I was afraid if I had it shipped from Indiana to Utah, it wouldn’t be there by that Friday when I got home and I wouldn’t be able to put it on that weekend. I was sitting on my suitcase in my bedroom and when my daughter came in to say hello after being gone for the week, she saw it and said, “Oh, pretty!”. I had to agree. I was doing some reading on headers and starting searching for info on header wrap. What I found on many pages was pretty much this. Wrapping your headers keeps the heat in the runners and keeps the gases hotter which in turn makes them flow faster, helping scavenge more gases from the engine. Hotter gases expand faster and all works together to create more pressure and energy to spool the turbo quicker and faster. Plus I was thinking about covering up the huge hole in the top of the tunnel where the stock header sat and without the header exposed to the tunnel, might build up too much heat under the heat shield. So wrapping the header would keep more heat going out the turbo and muffler and not between the engine and the heat shield with nowhere to go. So I wrapped the header and then coated it with the silicone spray they make to seal the fiberglass wrap. I wrapped the entire thing including the flexible joint but then later cut the wrap off the joint because I thought it restricted its movement too much.

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

There were a few spots that I couldn’t completely cover because the pipes were too close together but I was pretty happy with the way it turned out. I decided to close off the tunnel after all and cut a piece of aluminum diamond plate I had laying around and made it just slightly larger than the heat shield footprint. Then drilled holes in the right places for the machine screws that fasten the heat shield in place to go through. Here’s what that looks like:

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

There’s the part of the tunnel cooler on the front that bends up over the top of the front of the tunnel and it has a couple of rivets one of the which was missing. I drilled out the other and slid the aluminum plate underneath and as far forward as it would go.

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

I thought about it for a while and read a couple of posts of others that had thought of doing the same. One of the big concerns was that there might be too much heat build up without it being exposed to the tunnel and snow. Cannondale mentioned his headers were wrapped and he’d run his that way but I thought I might want to do something else. I didn’t want the header exposed to snow, water, or ice thrown up from the track so I thought about venting it and making a baffle to keep anything from being able to hit the header if it came up through the vent holes. This is what I did:

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

I shaped the baffle so that there’s about ½” clearance between the baffle and the heat shield on both sides and the top. Here’s it all installed:

 

[Bruce Jardine]

 

[Bruce Jardine]

When I had pulled the stock header off, there was a header bolt missing on the bottom right side of the engine. When I put the header on, there’s two slots in the flange instead of holes to make it easier to install. You put the two bottom right bolts in their holes and slide the header flange down over them. Then you just have to tighten them up. Well, I figured out why there wasn’t a bolt in that hole. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get a wrench or socket on that bolt. Must not have come with one in it from the factory due to the lack of access. So I figured I could pull it off again and remove that bolt and left it out or maybe I could make something that would work. The next day, I bought another 10mm wrench and put my plan into action: