This morning at the local Walmart, I again checked out their selection of cartridges to fit my Toyota, including the Fram Ultra 10358. I looked at only one.
The good news was that the pleats of today's example were much more uniformly spaced than I'd seen on earlier examples in which about half the pleats were crammed together into maybe a third of the circumference---so tightly it is hard to imagine how oil could easily get past the non-existent gap between the inner creases. Big improvement!
However ... Looking into the center hole, I saw a small piece of metal protruding inward from the metal screen backing. It extended far enough toward the center that it would not have cleared the center tube of the housing, if someone installed it. I decided to poke at the protruding piece to see whether it would break off easily. As soon as I touched it very lightly, it fell off in the floor. It was apparently completely loose, resting between the metal backing and the center hole of the end cap. In hindsight, I should've found and picked up the fragment and measured it, since someone here is sure to inquire how large it was, or want a photograph. It was "X" shaped, evidently a stray fragment of the backing material, about as large as it could be without including more than one intersection of the criss-crossed pattern. Maybe roughly 1.5×2.0 millimeters.
Perhaps as a result of my tampering with the merchandise, that steel fragment will not end up in a very bad place in someone's engine.
The good news was that the pleats of today's example were much more uniformly spaced than I'd seen on earlier examples in which about half the pleats were crammed together into maybe a third of the circumference---so tightly it is hard to imagine how oil could easily get past the non-existent gap between the inner creases. Big improvement!
However ... Looking into the center hole, I saw a small piece of metal protruding inward from the metal screen backing. It extended far enough toward the center that it would not have cleared the center tube of the housing, if someone installed it. I decided to poke at the protruding piece to see whether it would break off easily. As soon as I touched it very lightly, it fell off in the floor. It was apparently completely loose, resting between the metal backing and the center hole of the end cap. In hindsight, I should've found and picked up the fragment and measured it, since someone here is sure to inquire how large it was, or want a photograph. It was "X" shaped, evidently a stray fragment of the backing material, about as large as it could be without including more than one intersection of the criss-crossed pattern. Maybe roughly 1.5×2.0 millimeters.
Perhaps as a result of my tampering with the merchandise, that steel fragment will not end up in a very bad place in someone's engine.
![[Linked Image]](https://i.imgur.com/BAe3e2U.jpg "[Linked Image]")
