Quote Originally Posted by jerry clayton View Post
You can probably do ss as cheap as ceramic coating, and you can still weld/repair/modify it at any time

Jerry's exactly correct. It's going to cost you $500 to $600 to ceramic coat a full mild steel system, with headers. The cost of mild steel plus ceramic is close to the same price as SS.

One thing not discussed is heat radiation. I drove my roadster for 7,000 miles "in bare steel" before I took it apart for paint. While the car was apart I had the entire exhaust and headers ceramic coated in satin black (at EMBEE). It is amazing how much cooler the exhaust system runs after it was coated. I was concerned about the heat because I run smooth hood sides and did not want to be blistering the new paint.

When building the system make sure you design it to have parts that are "no longer" than five feet. I spoke with several ceramic coaters before I built the system and that seemed like thats the maximum oven size for most ceramic coating companies. Also, I used stainless steel V-Band clamps to connect the mufflers, and they work great. The hardest (most time consuming part) of building the whole system was building the hangers.