What is THE BEST oil filter on the market?

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: Trav
It really doesn't matter if 20% or 50% get past it does it. It still gets past it to do damage if there were even any to begin with.
So much for clean oil as you claimed in another thread, if the filter is allowing 20% of the damaging particles through you can hardly call that clean.
Hypothetical how many 5 micron particles out of 100 are enough to do damage and to what extent, 10? 20? 50?? Prove it makes a difference.


The bottom line, which you don't seem to believe, is that cleaner oil results in less engine wear. Every study ever done comes to the same conclusion. For myself, I like to keep the oil as clean as possible, regardless of how much crud I thing there may or may not be in the oil. I'm not continually measuring the oil cleanliness in real time, so I just elect to use a very efficient filter so I know whatever is in the oil is mostly being caught by the filter.

And tearing down an engine and not "seeing" wear, or finding that dimensional measurements are still within FSM spec range is not a true way to determine the actual wear. There may still be some wear going on to some degree even with a high efficiency filter, but certainly at a lower rate that with a low efficiency filter.

People that understand filtering efficiency, oil cleanliness and wear will continue to use high efficiency filters ... those who don't will say it doesn't matter. Whatever floats your boat.

 

[tig1]

"Not a true way to determine the actual wear". Doug Hillary may disagree with you.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: tig1
"Not a true way to determine the actual wear". Doug Hillary may disagree with you.


To clarify, I'm saying you can't just tear a motor apart and measure all the parts and say it never wore just because the measurements are still within the FSM spec. You'd have to tear down the brand new motor to make all those measurements first for a baseline. And even if you tore it down 200K miles later you still couldn't say that using one filter over another would have made a difference because there would be no way to conduct that test on that same exact engine you were making measurements on.

All it says is the measurements are still within FSM specs, which means it's not considered "worn out" per the FSM.

 

[tig1]

Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
Originally Posted By: tig1
"Not a true way to determine the actual wear". Doug Hillary may disagree with you.


To clarify, I'm saying you can't just tear a motor apart and measure all the parts and say it never wore just because the measurements are still within the FSM spec. You'd have to tear down the brand new motor to make all those measurements first for a baseline. And even if you tore it down 200K miles later you still couldn't say that using one filter over another would have made a difference because there would be no way to conduct that test on that same exact engine you were making measurements on.

All it says is the measurements are still within FSM specs, which means it's not considered "worn out" per the FSM.


I understand. However if after 200K and an engine spec'd within OEM specs, that would be a very good thing.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: tig1
I understand. However if after 200K and an engine spec'd within OEM specs, that would be a very good thing.


Of course it would, never eluded otherwise. But how it was taken care of over those 200K could have resulted in less wear at 200K miles compared to if taken care of some other way. Many factors contributing to wear of course, the oil filter is just one factor to consider. My thoughts are keep the "anti-wear triangle" strong (air filter, oil filter and oil) and the engine will like it.

 

[Trav]

Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
You'd have to tear down the brand new motor to make all those measurements first for a baseline. And even if you tore it down 200K miles later you still couldn't say that using one filter over another would have made a difference because there would be no way to conduct that test on that same exact engine you were making measurements on.

All it says is the measurements are still within FSM specs, which means it's not considered "worn out" per the FSM.


No it doesn't mean it is just not worn out if you are referring to my engine. there are two sets of measurements in the manual, new assembly spec and wear min/max measurements, they are different specs.
If the new assembly spec is between 1 and 6 and this engine has 3 the maximum it could have worn is 2 if it was assembled on the tight end of the scale. AFAIK parts don't increase in size as the wear.

For the sake of argument say it was assembled at 1 and did wear 2 points in over 200K it still has 3 to go before even reaching the max assembled spec for a new engine not the wear maximum, if everything remained the same that would bring it over 500K and still be nowhere near worn out.
You omit that in this engine there were no scratches or scoring which is a sure sign there was no damaging particle streaking and the filter was doing its job.

The engine did this on no synthetic oil filters, nothing special. Like I said there is nothing wrong with Fram Ultra but some people on this board are getting the impression they are doing something for their engine that is reducing wear and it isn't, its that simple.
What they are getting is possibly longer service life that's all. For a regular 10k or less OCI it is no better or worse than any other quality filter.

If you want to run them that your business and your engine, you can believe your own propaganda, white papers, test, mambo jumbo and the advertising spin all you like.
Me, I trust these (just a small sample of the measuring tools I own, I don't do silly string), surface finish gauges, dial indicators, etc to check for engine wear.

If these tools tell me the crank and bearings are within new assembly specs that's more than good enough for me. Claiming its not good enough and it would be better if I tore the new engine down first is like pizzing on me then trying to convince me its raining.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: Trav
If these tools tell me the crank and bearings are within new assembly specs that's more than good enough for me. Claiming its not good enough and it would be better if I tore the new engine down first is like pizzing on me then trying to convince me its raining.


It doesn't matter how many measurement tools you have, or how many FSM specs you have. If you don't tear down the engine with zero miles on it and measure everything you have no starting baseline to do any kind of wear test. You're using "new assembly" spec ranges as your baseline, which is useless because it's a starting range, not the actual measurements.

All you're doing is proving the engine is not worn out per FSM specs, it doesn't tell you how much wear there actually was. If that's good enough then that's all great if the engine isn't considered "worn out" per the FSM specs. But the fact still remains that cleaner oil means less wear, and it's been proven many times with way more tools than micrometers and calipers.

If you think more efficient oil filters don't help at all with wear then that's all great for you. But don't claim there's no diffetence when your method of determining wear based on oil filtration is invalid.

 

[dnewton3]

Teardown analysis is helpful, but it's not any "better" than UOAs, because TDs have limitations also. TD are very susceptible to gage R&R issues. The lack of repeatability and reproducibility are well known in singular examples such as a unique TD. Further, presuming you're going to reuse the engine, there will also be reassembly inputs to the equation that also alter the outputs for the next measurement.


- TDs are a great way to confirm a suspected diagnosis of failure mode ... I hear a knocking; I tore down the engine; I found loose con-rod bolts. Or, I can see scoring in the piston bore; the liner has been damaged to a point of replacement.

- TDs can let you know if you're at some physical spec limit in terms of serviceability, such as the cam lobes are worn; the minimum lift of the cam lobe has fallen below a tolerance; or bore concentricity has been exceeded.

- TDs are a poor way to measure "wear" in a sense of "normal" performance because the inputs of assembly/reassembly and part-to-part variability consume a large portion of the R&R. You cannot measure parts at the initial assembly, then upon disassembly 200k miles later, and know what caused good or poor wear, because of the variability of inputs through the lifecycle, versus other options not selected. Can't be done at all.

 

[Trav]

Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
\

If you think more efficient oil filters don't help at all with wear then that's all great for you. But don't claim there's no diffetence when your method of determining wear based on oil filtration is invalid.


You cannot prove running any brand of oil filter including the Fram ultra results in less engine wear. You even said it yourself it is only 80% efficient with 5 micron particles which you also said are in the range of the most damaging particle size.

BTW Calipers are only used for things like bolt length, rough hole depth and other rough non critical measurements all critical ID and OD are done with a digital micrometer and depth gauge.
A tear down is a snapshot in time aside from measurements it also provides visual clues as to whats going on inside the engine.

The lack of particle streaking and scratches in the soft bearing overlay (tri metal bearings) tells there were no significant damaging particles passing through the oil film.
Oddly enough many Toyota engines show very clean bearing overlay even though according to some on this board Toyota filters are not much better as far as efficiency goes than cheesecloth in a can.

 

[goodtimes]

Originally Posted By: Trav
Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
\

If you think more efficient oil filters don't help at all with wear then that's all great for you. But don't claim there's no diffetence when your method of determining wear based on oil filtration is invalid.


You cannot prove running any brand of oil filter including the Fram ultra results in less engine wear. You even said it yourself it is only 80% efficient with 5 micron particles which you also said are in the range of the most damaging particle size.

BTW Calipers are only used for things like bolt length, rough hole depth and other rough non critical measurements all critical ID and OD are done with a digital micrometer and depth gauge.
A tear down is a snapshot in time aside from measurements it also provides visual clues as to whats going on inside the engine.

The lack of particle streaking and scratches in the soft bearing overlay (tri metal bearings) tells there were no significant damaging particles passing through the oil film.
Oddly enough many Toyota engines show very clean bearing overlay even though according to some on this board Toyota filters are not much better as far as efficiency goes than cheesecloth in a can.


There's someone who has actually been doing some measuring. You forgot one aspect of measuring, the creature doing it. It takes experience. You can tell someone who has used a micrometer by how they hold it.
They keep on talking efficiency using one word, like there is only one efficiency gauge. There is good data showing an unknown brand filter beat the Fram Ultra in a particle tally after an oil change on a car. "They" don't like to hear about it. Must have been a mistake, they say. Motorking stated 1 gram per 1000 miles is an average for particles added for cars. Assuming a few numbers, that is 1 gram "dirt" passed through an oil filter 3,600 times. 4 qts capacity, 3 gpm flow rate, and a steady 50mph running engine. No idling, no traffic which make the trips through the filter go up. Let's try to imagine that 1 gram circulating 3,600 times over 200 hours. That's a lot of try's for the filter to take out so little. Just maybe a filter doing well on a fast, high loading, efficiency test doesn't do so well in a car engine over thousands of miles. What if the filter filters a little slower, but finer? Maybe it does do well, but maybe not.

 

[bullwinkle]

Slower but finer is the definition of a bypass filter (which would be better on most clean engines than a full flow anyway). My long term filter test bed is the wife's xB in my sig-geared like a farm tractor, it does very little high speed highway service, almost all low speed local stop & go driving-yet it is still so clean inside that even after 20K the Ultra has only a few carbon bits in the can & media. The filter would literally rust off the engine before it ever got loaded enough to go into bypass.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: Trav
Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
If you think more efficient oil filters don't help at all with wear then that's all great for you. But don't claim there's no difference when your method of determining wear based on oil filtration is invalid.

You cannot prove running any brand of oil filter including the Fram ultra results in less engine wear. You even said it yourself it is only 80% efficient with 5 micron particles which you also said are in the range of the most damaging particle size.


I don't need to prove it ... it's already been proven and documented by many guys smarter than me or you with testing methods that show better filtration results in cleaner oil, which results in less engine wear. If you can find one decent technical source that says otherwise then post up the links.

You missed the whole point of why a filter that has better efficiency at 20 microns is also better at 5 microns, and therefore does a better job over the whole particle size spectrum. I'd say filtering out 80% @ 5u is a whole lot better than filtering out 10% @ 5u which is about what a 50% @ 20u filter would do.


Originally Posted By: Trav
A tear down is a snapshot in time aside from measurements it also provides visual clues as to whats going on inside the engine.

Exactly ... just a snapshot. Not a delta in measurements - you need at least two data points to determine a difference in wear. That's my point about you claiming there was no wear when you just compare measurements to FSM specs. There is zero control in that experiment. All you have to compare the measurements to are FSM spec tolerance ranges that say it's either outside the service limit ("worn out") or not. You never had any baseline measurements to start with.

Originally Posted By: Trav
The lack of particle streaking and scratches in the soft bearing overlay (tri metal bearings) tells there were no significant damaging particles passing through the oil film.

I'm talking about wear ... not "significant damage". Those are two different things. An engine part can actually look like there's no wear, but a measurement compared to a baseline measurement might tell otherwise. If particles
Originally Posted By: Trav
Oddly enough many Toyota engines show very clean bearing overlay even though according to some on this board Toyota filters are not much better as far as efficiency goes than cheesecloth in a can.

As said many times, there are other factors involved with preventing engine wear. The oil filter is one factor, just as is the air filter and the motor oil (the "anti-wear trio"). Under the exact same operating conditions on the same exact engine, do you think all motor oils used will result in the same amount of engine wear? Do you think all air filters (including a cheese cloth K&N) used will result in the same engine wear?

We are just going to have to agree to disagree since we won't change each other's minds. I'll use high efficiency filters and you use whatever you deem appropriate and life will go on.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: goodtimes
They keep on talking efficiency using one word, like there is only one efficiency gauge. There is good data showing an unknown brand filter beat the Fram Ultra in a particle tally after an oil change on a car. "They" don't like to hear about it. Must have been a mistake, they say.


Probably was something amiss with that particle counts (either one of them) - could have been a number of reasons why it could be invalid. I can also pull up a thread out of the UOA forum that shows the oil in a motorcycle for 5K miles (shared clutch & transmission) and using a 99% @ 20u filter was cleaner in a particle count than the particle count done on the new oil out of the bottle he used. One instance of something happening doesn't make it gospel.

Originally Posted By: goodtimes
Motorking stated 1 gram per 1000 miles is an average for particles added for cars. Assuming a few numbers, that is 1 gram "dirt" passed through an oil filter 3,600 times. 4 qts capacity, 3 gpm flow rate, and a steady 50mph running engine. No idling, no traffic which make the trips through the filter go up. Let's try to imagine that 1 gram circulating 3,600 times over 200 hours. That's a lot of try's for the filter to take out so little. Just maybe a filter doing well on a fast, high loading, efficiency test doesn't do so well in a car engine over thousands of miles. What if the filter filters a little slower, but finer? Maybe it does do well, but maybe not.


So explain to me why a filter that tests 99% @ 20 microns is going to do a worse job of filtering on the road than a filter that tests 50% @ 20 microns. I want to hear the magic that happens in a case like that ... and you can't include filters that tore media.

Yes, each time a mm^3 of oil circulates through the filter there's a chance that particles will get trapped. But those chances go way down with a very inefficient oil filter. That means some particles may make many trips through the oiling system before being caught in the filter. The whole objective of the filter is to try and trap particles the first time, or maybe a 2nd or 3rd time around ... not the 25th or 30th time around. I've shown the table comparing a 50% @ 20u vs 99% @ 20u filter at capturing 1 million particles, and by the time the 50% @ 20u catches them all there has been 100 times more particles (1M vs 10k) sent through the engine by the inefficient filter.

 

[Trav]

Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix


We are just going to have to agree to disagree since we won't change each other's minds. I'll use high efficiency filters and you use whatever you deem appropriate and life will go on.

I'm good with that, I will stay with my old NG, OE, MANN, Mahle or FU when they are available.

 

[goodtimes]

Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
Originally Posted By: goodtimes
They keep on talking efficiency using one word, like there is only one efficiency gauge. There is good data showing an unknown brand filter beat the Fram Ultra in a particle tally after an oil change on a car. "They" don't like to hear about it. Must have been a mistake, they say.


Probably was something amiss with that particle count - could have been a number of reasons why it could be invalid. I can also pull up a thread out of the UOA forum that shows the oil in a motorcycle for 5K miles (shared clutch & transmission) and using a 99% @ 20u filter was cleaner in a particle count than the particle count done on the new oil out of the bottle he used. One instance of something happening doesn't make it gospel.

Originally Posted By: goodtimes
Motorking stated 1 gram per 1000 miles is an average for particles added for cars. Assuming a few numbers, that is 1 gram "dirt" passed through an oil filter 3,600 times. 4 qts capacity, 3 gpm flow rate, and a steady 50mph running engine. No idling, no traffic which make the trips through the filter go up. Let's try to imagine that 1 gram circulating 3,600 times over 200 hours. That's a lot of try's for the filter to take out so little. Just maybe a filter doing well on a fast, high loading, efficiency test doesn't do so well in a car engine over thousands of miles. What if the filter filters a little slower, but finer? Maybe it does do well, but maybe not.


So explain to me why a filter that tests 99% @ 20 microns is going to do a worse job of filtering on the road than a filter that tests 50% @ 20 microns. I want to hear the magic that happens in a case like that ... and you can't include filters that tore media.

Yes, each time a mm^3 of oil circulates through the filter there's a chance that particles will get trapped. But those chances go way down with a very inefficient oil filter. That means some particles may make many trips through the oiling system before being caught in the filter. The whole objective of the filter is to try and trap particles the first time, or maybe a 2nd or 3rd time around ... not the 25th or 30th time around. I've shown the table comparing a 50% @ 20u vs 99% @ 20u filters at capturing 1 million particles, and by the time the 50% @ 20u catches them all there has been 100 times more particles (1M vs 10k) sent through the engine by the inefficient filter.


It isn't just a mm cube of oil it is the whole gallon which passes through the filter every 20 seconds at 3 gpm. A short warm up in the driveway, or a mile at 60 mph. A filter with some finer fibers blended in may actually catch more given more time. That's what the bypass filters do.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Originally Posted By: goodtimes
It isn't just a mm cube of oil it is the whole gallon which passes through the filter every 20 seconds at 3 gpm.


Everyone who got the gist would know it's the whole 3,785,412 mm^3 that passes through the filter every 80 seconds.

 

[Yah-Tah-Hey]

Originally Posted By: Yah-Tah-Hey
Next Year
I know but I have to wait until 2019 to tell BITOGs the answer.

 

[ZeeOSix]

Looks like the DENSO man changed his handle - why?

 

[Tony10s]

Originally Posted By: Yah-Tah-Hey
Originally Posted By: Yah-Tah-Hey
Next Year
I know but I have to wait until 2019 to tell BITOGs the answer.

Your answer is (drum roll):
DENSO

 

[Yah-Tah-Hey]

Originally Posted By: ZeeOSix
Looks like the DENSO man changed his handle - why?
No chicanery intended for changing my on-screen handle. I don't know what I clicked on but my email address showed up as screen name. Maybe it was always that but I don't think so. We lived in the middle of the Navajo Nation in the seventies and I like their greeting/goodbye/ whatever.