At one of my places of employment we're a dealer for a very well known manufacturer of thermal heat barrier products. We have been a distributor of theirs for years now and are very pleased with all of the products we carry to date. One of the items that they make that we haven't offered yet is their Turbo Thermal Wrap. This part claims it can virtually eliminate turbo lag and keep your turbo spooled up longer. I'm not an expert on forced air induction but I can't seem to grasp how retaining heat in the turbo is going to do this.

The thing is I'm getting a sample to use on my '06 CTD and before I embark on this fact finding mission I was wondering if anyone has ever wrapped their turbo, and if there are any pros or cons to doing this.

I don't want to slap this thing on if it's going to hurt in any way (which I really can't see that happening) and I don't want to not only sell it, but hang a worthless piece of material on my truck if this is just another bit of snake oil.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

If you wrap the turbo you will have issues with the turbine housing. It will degrade the metal and wear it quicker causing the housing metal to get thin. Great for race car use but not to good of an idea for longevity.

 

I believe the theory is that it doesn't allow as much heat loss from the cooling of un-shielded exhaust piping, the exhaust manifold and the turbo housing. The more heat you retain in the exhaust manifold and turbo housing, the faster the turbo will spin.

 

hey 725gus, i'd be more than happy too "road test" one of those for ya.....

 

Thanks Spooler, Thanks Rad.

I thought that there would be a degredation problem involved in this because I used to use header wrap on my race cars and bikes. Worked great but turned the metal to crud in no time.

I think I'll give the turbo wrap to one of our resident WRX STi guys and let him blow up his rice grinder with it. The company spoken of is sending me a wrap for my intake pipe as well. I think I'll just stick that on and try it out. Obviously won't do much for performance but it might look nice.

Oh hey JPR. I'll bet you'd like to volunteer as our test driver. You'll have to stand in line though since I have a half dozen employees drooling over the stuff I get in here. Thanks for the offer though.

 

aw shucks!!!

 

Yeah, I talked with a Turbo builder in Cali. can't remember where. He rebuilds turbo's for everything. From the tiny ones to the gotta get the crane to pick it up and put on a jig. It has been a while but I think it was TEC. I still have the turbo in use on my 1975 Datsun 280z. It was built back in 1995 I think.