I saw another forum member had his Berk HFC ceramic coated. Is this generally a positive thing to do while running an otherwise stock exhaust? Or a "looks good thing that is neutral or counter productive to performance?

What about just running a HFC without ceramic coating and no OEM heat shield?

 

Was probably running it without a heat shield and coated it to reduce the passenger floorboard getting very hot due to that.

 

yeah the Berk does not have the heatshields on it like the oem cat has, I don't think it has anything to do with performance, nice if you can do it, but not necessary.

 

I asked Magnaflow (which manufactures the core on the Berk) about putting exhaust heat wrap on the cat.
But they advised against it because "If it maintains too much heat, it could damage the internal components".
I think a coating would probably be fine though.

 

I have the Rockstar garage 70mm HFC with the Gotuning Greddy S.E. exhaust with no heat shield on the HFC. According to Rockstar garage, ceramic coating is unnecessary but I'm assuming it's gotta lower the temp. No CEL by the way with this HFC. I'd also changed the O2 sensor with the new HFC. I've had zero issues so far and sounds amazing!

 

No CEL with my Berk 63.5mm High Flow cat and it passed Ohio smog two or there times. No excessive on the starboard floor that I know of -- but I don't sit there. I had heatshield tabs welded on the cat but a chunk of concrete on the road struck the heatshield and broke a couple tabs off. So much rattle I pulled the heatshields and never replaced them.

-- Chuck

 

Following up on this thread, I contacted a couple of manufacturers (magnaflow, borla) that recommended against ceramic coating their catalytic converters due to extra heat retention reducing the service life of the cat. It's doable but they won't last as long.