Articles

Inconel® refers to a family of trademarked high strength austenitic nickel-chromium-iron alloys that have exceptional anti-corrosion and heat-resistance properties. These alloys contain high levels of nickel and can be thought of as super-stainless steels. Inconel alloys are used for a variety of extreme applications including navy boat exhaust ducts, submarine propulsion motors, undersea cable sheathing, heat exchanger tubing and gas turbine shroud rings. For many years, Inconel has been use...

Burns Stainless Merge Collectors are highly respected by many engine builders including NASCAR, and are widely used by champions in NHRA, IMSA, FIA-GT, and V8 Supercars. Burns Stainless Merge Collectors (Header Collectors) are custom engineered for each application using our proprietary X-design parametric custom exhaust design computer program. Merge Collectors combine high flow and high velocity to increase and broaden an engine's torque curve all the way to the horsepower peak and beyon...

A question I am often asked is “why don’t you recommend aluminum for an exhaust material?” They continue, “so-and-so" has been running it on his car for years without any problems.” So let’s take a closer look at this topic. Exhaust tubes experience stress from a variety of sources including thermal stress, vibration, exhaust pressure, hitting the ground (usually when loading car on trailer), chassis bind etc… The combination of these stresses result in an applied stress to the tube material....

High exhaust gas temperatures, high exhaust pressure, cramped engine compartments and the complexity of turbocharged applications pose extreme challenges for exhaust headers. In an attempt to overcome these challenges, many header builders have resorted to using thick gauged tubing and pipe to fabricate exhaust manifolds. Though this may be ok in a street application, it is not acceptable practice for a serious race application due to the high weight penalty. The good news is that durable, li...

Pressure Analysis Top Topics Two highly technical presentations covering exhaust theory and the testing and evaluation of cylinder pressures opened day two of the Advanced Engineering Technology Conference in Indianapolis. Vincent Roman of Burns Stainless spoke on “Development Tools and Testing Methods for the Optimization of Exhaust Performance,” and NASCAR consultant Cecil Stevens covered “How to Use Cylinder Pressure and Valve Motion Measurements to Improve Performance.” There are many var...

We have our TIG welder ready to go. We have our header tubes tacked together with perfect fitment. We have properly fit the pipes to the flange and have our back purge system setup. So you may ask, are we ready to weld? Yes, we are finally ready to weld up the header. It is worth repeating that a well fabricated header is the result of many hours of diligent planning and preparation. I often get calls from customers who want to fabricate headers who tell me "I can weld stainless." Not to take...

“It takes less time to do it right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.” - Henry W. Longfellow We are often times asked why our stainless mandrel bends and tubing is expensive compared with our competition. There are several reasons. We use U.S. sourced, ASTM certified tubing (in some rare cases we may use a Canadian or Japanese sourced product based on availability). We use the utmost care in the mandrel bending process. As you know, mandrel bending is a process where metal tubing ...

Hope you are enjoying these articles on exhaust header design. Building headers from mandrel-bent stainless tubing using proper fabrication techniques is important, but proper header design is crucial. Last month, we considered 180 degree exhaust headers for V-8s. As discussed, the 180 degree concept was developed to help even out the exhaust pulses from an uneven firing 90 degree crank V-8 in order to broaden the engine power band. The concept was very successful as illustrated by the Ford ...