Cartridge oil filters (i.e., filters that sit inside a usable metal housing) have actually been around since the 1920s but have taken a back-seat to spin-ons from the mid-1960s to about the mid-1990s for the sake of convenience and ease-of-use. However, over the last two decades, ecologically-friendly cartridges have made a resurgence– recapturing a 20% chunk of the automotive aftermarket. Unlike older cartridges, new ones are able to achieve the high flow rates required by today’s modern engine designs. This is because of their extremely efficient cellulose media and high flow rates. Also, anti-drain back valves and other advancements such as centrifuge or thermal action bypass systems just didn’t exist back then. Used metal canister oil filters have become an environmental problem. Drivers in California, alone, use nearly 70 million canister filters per year (500 million in the U.S.). The California Department of Resources, Recycling, and Recovery reports that if every conventional spin-on oil filter sold annually in California was recycled, this would generate enough steel to build three sports stadiums. So, considering the sheer volume of vehicles on the road it’s not hard to understand that the ability to dispose of oil filters can have significant implications for the environment. Since the construction of cartridge oil filters doesn’t include any metal, they can be incinerated instead of being tossed in a landfill.
I watched my Grandfather cut one of these open and saw how much WATER it pulled out. But with todays shortages. . . .
It is interesting that there is a company in Berks Co., PA that recycles canister oil filters for the steel and waste oil. This looks like a better option than dealing with messy cartridges.
Back in 60's the manufacturers pretty much changed all their filters over to canister filters. I remember installing adapters on small block chevy engines because the cartridges were being phased out, you couldn't find them anymore. Everyone loved the "disposable" canister filters since they really were less messy. Remember back then, normal oil changes were every 3,000 to 4,000 miles. (And you'd be lucky to get 20,000 miles out of your bias ply tires.) Its great that this place recycles the canister filters. I question how many actually get to any recycling center like this. To help save the environment, I'm all for going back to cartridge type filters since I can't do my own oil changes anymore.
Back before the Challenger, my wife and I had 6 cylinder BMWs. Those engines have a chamber on the top, where the cartridge filter goes. Wicked easy. No crawling under the car. One bolt. German engineering has its pros.
With the filter on top, with the filter can oriented to oil can drain when car is sitting still, one con is that it takes a bit longer on startup to get the car's oil into the bearings. One pro is that after the car has sat a while, the filter is largely drained, so one can swap out oil filters more often at little cost of oil. I would be willing to try a toilet paper filter as invented by that guy decades ago and still for sale. Heck, in fact, I could swap out toilet paper wound around a stock core and put that in. I would have to examine the viability on an individual case-by-case basis. Someone's extra, bypass ultra-low-flow filter system that super-filters a trickle of engine oil at all times: And, for a system that filters by centrifugal force, with a spinning chamber instead of paper or other media:
I would never use toilet paper filter as an oil filter. It is a very bad idea. It is made from chemical pulp and degrades rapidly when it comes into contact with any liquid. In homes, for example, it degrades in water in 10 to 15 seconds, and dissolves completely in 10 to 20 minutes to prevent clogged waste pipes.
Au contraire. Toilet paper is made of cellulose fiber, which does not degrade when it comes in contact with oil. In fact, oil filters have been made of cellulose fibers for decades, perhaps a century or more. He addresses the idea at this point There are materials that dissolve in water and not oil and vice versa. Iodine, for example, I do not believe dissolves in water, but in some other clear liquid, forming a purple solute. Alcohol, maybe? People, many people, have run the toilet paper filter for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of miles. At no time has anyone reported that the filter dissolved. Their facts are more factual than anyone else's opinion. You are free to run paper oil filters that everyone else sells in your car while avoiding the superior and well-proven filtration of the deep, very-difficult-to-clog toilet paper medium. Such brands include Fram, Purolator, etc. In fact, the filters are so effective that they can be used for purifying the oil, such as in the Frantz synthetic oil hack in the video I posted above. Oil flow in the Frantz is not across plies. it is ALONG THEM, which really increases the amount of usable filtration area, as a filter that went through the plies would get clogged pretty quickly, relatively speaking. I still think the centrifugal is the best filtration system, unless you have some really hard particles that are the EXACT same density as the oil, which would limit the ability of the filtration system to separate them. In FACT, I wonder if one were to rig up one's own system to flog the oil over and over through multiple filtration media, could one just keep reusing the oil for a far longer period of time? I do not think "indefinitely" is as available, as there are ADDITIVES in that oil, and they can break down due to heat, exposure to the atmosphere and crankcase gases and gasoline, etc. As one Cummins engineer told me once, the thing that made the "blue" series of motor oils from Cummins different/better was, and I quote this directly, "the additive package." Some impurities are not particles, per se, I would imagine, and a really high-RPM centrifugal "filter" would stratify any impurities, as long as they were not identical in density to the oil itself. Now, oil that was contaminated with coolant, I am not sure it can be rescued unless one could boil off the XXXXXX-glycol and the water, preferably in the absence of oxygen, to de-integrate the possibly-dissolved-and-or-detergent-integrated things in the oil. The HD in oil formerly stood for heavy duty AND high detergent. The more detergent, the more tolerance the oil had for errant water, and these engines DO produce water along with plant-survival-necessary-CO2.
