Heat Tape + Baffle + No Brace = Broken Header, Fixed, but just a heads up Options

[Bigmeanbulldog55]

My dang header broke again. This is the 2nd time. 1st time it broke at the collector and the down pipe just fell off. That was an easy fix because I could get all the way around it. This time the back 2 pipes and the front passenger side pipes cracked. There was a quarter inch round hole out of back drivers side pipe too. And it was in the front of it. I could not get to that thing. My dad and I spent about 5 hours screwing around with it trying to get to it. Welder, torch, and melted brass ended up kind of fixing it. There is still a little hole, but it's not noticeable audibly. My dad and I figured that what caused it was the heat tape keeping the pipe too hot and the baffle holding the flow up too much also making it hot. I ran it hard for about 20 min and it was cracked with I stopped. The fact that it didn't have a brace didn't help, so we welded a nice one on. So if you have a header, put a brace of it and watch the temp of it.

[jdg371]

Yep heat tape is bad.. all it does is make the metal more fragile due to the collected heat..