Can anyone demystify motorsports header heat shields?

https://headershield.com/ is one example of a company offering this stuff. They clearly do beautiful work, but they make it seem like voodoo magic when I'm sure it's simply a time consuming but straightforward process. They definitely don't manufacture the material. It seems like it's stainless material and probably spot welded together? Anyone know exactly what the material is and how it's done?

They're made with stainless or inconel depending on the provider and application.

You might want to chat with PTP Turbo Blankets. They do sell that style of protection and they also sell blankets, wrap, and other items. Since they sell all the options they have no bias against any of them, and they're really open about letting you know the pros and cons of each.

There are definitely pros and cons to each, no solution is best in all ways. How well each holds heat in is one aspect, but service life, ease of removal, bulkiness, look are some other key factors.

I don't remember what brand we used, but we did a tubular manifold for a 3SGTE. This looks similiar https://turboworks.pl/product-eng-223568-Stainless-steel-heat-shield-0-1mm-500x1000mm.html

It was just a plain stainless steel sheet (but there can be one with a fiberglass layer), and we used scissors to cut it into strips. Then we used a normal MIG welding machine and replaced the tip with one from a plasma cutter (easy to get at any hardware store). When you placed it aganits the sheet and the manifold it did sort of a spot weld. And than just go all the way around. Becareful of cuts, althogh its not very easy to manipulate it with gloves.

John, heat is lost in 3 basic ways - conduction from direct contact - like when you brush against a hot exhaust, convection - basically air cooling, and radiation - basically infra-red radiation like an old bar heater.

Different means are used because they can have different requirements. The easiest is a barrier made of a low conductive material that holds the heat in (or out), and different materials, or combinations, have differing effectiveness. This is what they are using, and it looks to be rather effective, but a bit surprised it's not gold plated, as gold doesn't rediate, or absorb radiated heat, very easily, and works well on it's own - One reason very thin sheets of it are used for solar heat protection in spacecraft.