Fram Filters...Anyone having trouble with them

This pretty well explains it... problem was oil was black and only 800 miles and filter was collapsing. I can see why they would collapse now.

 

I've been using the car quest for a long time now.Never had a problem with them. I still try to educate friends about the fram lack of quality every time I see one!


jerry

 

Frantz Filters: They're the shit!

 

I think Car Quest are made by Wix.

 

from my previous post....

another oil filter that i have seen collapse is baldwin. i've seen several of them collapse internally. baldwin filters are junk as far as i'm concerned, and it sounds like fram filters are following suit.
i see collapsed baldwin oil and fuel filters all the time at work.(fuel and oil filters on diesel engines).

 

why do so many people plug the oil bypass???

why is so bad to plug the bypass???

always wonder???? thanks daye

 

That Fram is perfect for my Shovelhead. I run a car filter on my bike and I want it to be a little more free flowing. I change the oil every 1000 -1500 miles.

 

I was told years ago that Fram decided to put their money into advertising rather than product. My father in law showed me those cutaway filters 30 something years ago when he sold Wix on the industrial side.

 

I second what Enginepro said about Baldwin being a good filter. Never have seen a problem with them collapsing. beetlejuice, could it just be the diesel applications that have problems?

 

Two of the best items for your hot-rod with the chev powerplant,the Barnes 90* adapter and the Baldwin 279 H-P oil filter. Adapter gets the filter off the highway for more clearance on that lo flying rod and the Baldwin filter will take over 100psi on the hi-po oil pump>>>>.I don't know about pass car filters but I'll swear by these>>>>.

 

I have heard the Fram hipe for many years. I for one have used Fram filters exclusively since 1983 on all my cars and trucks and will continue to do so.

 

thanks for the info

 

The reason most people give for blocking the bypass is so that only filtered oil gets tot the engine. They claim it will make the engine last longer.

However, there are several problems with this theory. Most old school engines oil systems are designed to filter a percentage of the oil, not all of it. Most normal filters, when new, cannot flow as much as the stock pump is designed to pump. The more stuff the filters stop, the less oil they can flow. By the time you are due for an oil change, the filter is probably flowing substantially less than it did when new. This means that without the bypass, the filter is a restriction to flow (even the highest flowing 'street' type filters). This in turn causes 2 problems. One - a restriction between the pump and oil galleys can never be considered a good thing. Two - anywhere you have a restriction to flow, you will have a pressure differential - lower pressure after the restriction than before it. This pressure differential is the cause of almost all collapsed filters. The engineers spec'd a specific minimum strength for the filter to resist collapse. Some filter manufacturers over-do it more than others, and therefore are less likely to collapse under these conditions. However, just because a filter collapses under these conditions does not mean it is bad - it just means that that filter manufacturer chose not to spend extra money making it substantially stronger than the spec just to prevent a problem caused by something that should never be done anyway. The original reasons drag racers started doing this were to prevent a failure in one part of the engine from sending debris past the bypass and wiping out another part of the engine, and to identify impending failure sooner by having ALL of the evidence in the filter every time they inspect the filter media. This is actually another case of 'what's good for a race car isn't good for a street car'. They run high flow filter systems, street cars don't. They are also changing the filter every few minutes of run time. Think about it. A real race car runs (if it's a big field, and the car goes all the way to the finals) under 4 minutes in a day. Even on a 3-day event, if the crew doesn't pull the filter and inspect it after each day of competition (which most real race cars do, if not after every pass), you have 15 minutes of run time maximum between filter changes, and never more than 15-20 seconds of run time between checking the oil pressure by much more accurate means than you will find in any street car. Do you have a scientific grade oil filled oil pressure gauge that you check closely and log every 15-20 seconds on your street car? Do you have a high flow filter system on your street car? Do you change it every 15 minutes of run time or less? As someone mentioned, race filters on a street car are bad because the filtration is not fine enough. To be safe going 3000 miles between filter changes, you would have to have a dozen or more street spec filters plumbed in parallel. Of course, this would waste your bearings without a huge pressure accumulator to boost oil pressure during starting. You would also want to have a differential pressure gauge to warn if the filters became too much of a restriction. In a street car, you are not likely to have to worry about a rocker failure wiping out your bearings, etc. A few hundred bucks worth of aftermarket valvetrain parts (or in many cases, stock stuff) will get you something that is way overkill for most street applications as far as strength goes. The 'unfiltered' oil going through the bypass is generally pretty darn clean. Even if only a small percentage of the oil is filtered, statistically speaking, all of the oil would still pass through the filter many times per minute. On a real race car, not all of the oil would necessarily pass through the filter every time the engine was started, run, and shut down.
Finally, since I KNOW no one changes their filter every 10-15 minutes of run time, the bottom line is would you rather have the slightly dirty oil (only filtered every 8-10 passes through the pump on average) getting to your bearings at full pressure, or would you rather have a pressure loss? I'll take the slightly dirty oil.

Anecdotal evidence:
A well built engine that is well maintained (in my world) gets 300-400k miles out of the cylinder wall wear cycle. In most cases, at that time, the factory bearings still look new. I have heard stories of reusing 300k+ mile factory bearings during a rebuild, and they still looked reusable after ANOTHER 300k plus miles. The first 300k miles would have been in the 70s, when the best oil and best filters of the time made the cheapest, lamest stuff money can buy now, look REALLY good. The bypass wasn't plugged. How many people do you know who got 200k miles out of a set of bearings with the filter bypass plugged? I don't know anyone.

 

Motorcraft, Delco and Mopar filters are all quality filters









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Fram filters are made of very cheap paper/cardboard.


Within minutes of the oil soaking the paper the fram filter Will fail and allow the dirty oil to recirculate back into your engine.

If you can live with your oil filter actually filtering 3% of the dirty oil while sending 97% back thru the engine then buy fram.





At the base of the can is a paper disk (anti- drain back valve). This circular disk is supposed to prevent dirty oil from recirculating/draining back down the return oil holes into your engine.

A quality filter uses a plastic, metal or nitrile or silicon rubber anti- drain back valve which blocks off the filter oil inlets. .....All filters Except Fram (sold under a few other names) use a stiff/hard disk that is impervious to oil to prevent dirty oil from being recirculated and/or draining back.





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The paper disk in the fram soaks up the oil and within minutes of installation, the wet paper is easily distorted by the engines oil pressure.

Using a fram filter is almost like having virtually No filter at all once it gets set.

On a cold engine, the fram allows the oil to drain back from whence it came and on start up there is little to no oil in the engine so for the first few seconds your engine runs without oil/pressure until the oil pump brings the pressure up.

With a proper anti drain back valve, the oil cannot drain back thru the filter into the oil pan so the oil that's in the system, stays in the system. Very important on engine start up.

Cut a fram oil filter open to see the disk for yourself.
Cut a napa filter open just for comparison.

Fram oil filters do harm to the engine by allowing 97% of the contaminants in the oil to just keep recirculating thru the engine which wears the bearings and rings/walls at a high rate.


You may as well not use a filter if you are using a fram filter.
jmho



As others have stated, fram choose to invest heavily in advertising
and to keep the price of their filters competitive, they do not pay for costly nitrile rubber, silicon, metal or even plastic anti- drain back valves. A paper drain back valve allows fram to spend more on advertising which in turn places them as the number one oil filter for consumer use.
Just think of all the money that GM spends on advertising, Have you read consumer reposrts magazine lately regarding the reliability of 3+ year old vehicles?
Corporations who try to stay competitive while spending huge amounts on advertising must 'find' the money somewhere to continue to dominate the market. The $$ comes out of the consumers pocket when you are forced to put a new $4500 tranny in after 65 thousand miles, or a new heater control module on a 4 year old vehicle that is available only from the dealer for $500+.
Or how about an $850 (two) wire harness that goes 6 feet fromn the fuse box to the marker light on your new American made heartbeat minivan.

Fram is just doing the same thing as many other companies do..
...Spend the budget on Advertising to control the market share while letting people believe that "our Product is the longest lasting on the market, built with pride "like a rock" in the heart of Good ole USA.

The Truth is (most) people will never actually do any research as to which brands offer a Real Long Term Quality/Reliability. They just buy what they see on TV ads and believe the advert that it's got to be good because it's Motor Trend _____ of the year..

Sorry if I upset any Huge Corporation Fans and I certainly don't want to slander the company shareholders that want every last cent they can squeeze out of you while making the public believe that you can trust/Lean on their products because it's made with pride by people that have heartbeats in America.








IMHO, Fram filters are the FartHeat of America which seems somehow appropriate as they are most used on planned obsolescence automobiles with $850 marker light wiring harnesses that you Must purchase from the dealer because they are so delicate that a stray rock broke the tiny bulbs receptacle which is oddly not at all fixable by even the most ingenious mechanic or bodyman..


JMHO, but I have read the long term reliabilty studies on many products over the last 40+ years and I have an opinion.

 

a have always used fram and never had a problem , looks like i ahve driven 900k since high school, have a 16 year old truck with 295k on it fram filters always, motor have original everything except a water pump, the motor is still running good and the truck had a hard life. running hot and for extenede time no problems with fram filters. i will use 20/50 oil when i go out west in the summer time with the trailers high temp and heavy oil no problem for fram filter, i use fram air filters too

 

Interesting fram discussion. If using a Fram filter is like no filter at all, then do I need to run a filter? My 1976 Pinto (no jokes I was young and broke) whet OVER 250,000 miles (yes you heard that right) over 250,000 miles on Fram oil filters. It was then sold and was still running great. My 1980 Mustang (4 cylinder) whet 150,000 on Fram then sold. And now my 1994 Impala SS is at 120,000 of the hardest driving miles you can imagine on Fram. All this with no apparent failures due to dirty oil problems. How come? Am I just lucky?

You know, you guys might be right that Fram is junk, but I have heard this for years and a long time ago decided to stick to only Fram as a bit of an experiement. Fram should hire me for a commercial.

Mike

 

I've been using Fram filters in all (7) of my vehicles since the 70's or 80's when Consumer Reports magazine did a study of them and deemed Fram the best filter to use. I have put countless thousands of miles on cars with Fram filters and have never had a filter related engine problem.

Having said that, the fact that Walmart carries Fram, should have alerted me that they may well have been cheapened. Walmart is famous for beathing up on their vendors to provide ever lower pricing. One way for Fram to keep on selling through Walmart would be to cheapen the product substantially.

After my next filter change, I will be cutting up the filter to see what it looks like. I most likely find what others have observed and will change to A/C or WIX filters.

Thanks for all the input from everyone - makes sifting through the drama & bullshit posts, well worthwhile !!

 

the bosch also has the metal check spring,and a real check valve, i wish i could remember the url of the site where they cut all these filters apart and compared. i've been told since i was a little kid to stay away from fram,i have cut them open and actually found the strings wrapped around the filters. most of them have a plastic bypass valve that you can push open with your finger, and they have cardboard end caps. what do you think happens to cardboard when it's subjected to hot oil and pressure? as far as the fram "extra crap" filters, they are regular fram filters with some kind of goop on the filter media,just cost a lot more. oh as far as the bosch, they also found the stp filters were identical to the bosch filters inside,but only cost half as much. i actually compared a bosch and stp filter and they both had the same stamping numbers on the base plate. both were of excellent construction inside.
EDIT never mind,just found this on NTPOG, they had done the original study with help from the mini mopars site. dammit can no one leave a decent product alone? they were good filters,now they are made off shore along with everything else. went from being a really good filter to a shit filter, going to wix now. should have bought a case of them when they were good

 

You know, I changed the oil and filter on my 05 wrx, 96 dually with a 454, and 2000 ws6 Trans Am and they all make noise when starting. It bothers me because the other day after an oil change, the wrx did it when cold. The dually did it when it was cold a lot more severely and the T/A does it when cold too. I am using good oil, mobile 1 for the cars and quaker state for the truck, but AHA!! I have found the link! Thanks for sharing, I won't even bother taking the filters back so someone else doesn't have this problem. They will become one with old diapers in a land fill.

 

I cant believe this is even still a question... Click the link down in my signature line to see the damage a Fram can do!!!

 

Ill only use a systems 1 oil filter. You can take it apart and see what is in it, it looks good and I know for a fact it will hold up with 150 PSI oil pressure. They can be mounted rite on the engine or remote mounted.

 

Did a little looking,found this place.http://www.nationalfilters.com
$3.54 for wix oil filter and 10 dollar for tranny for wifes van.

 

K&N for life

 

you know they let more through don't you? they are designed as a racing filter, and thats their design. not being defective,but on a race motor designed to be torn down between races, it doesn't matter.

 

I've been using System 1 oil filters for years.

They work just fine.

 

I've used Fram on everything I've ever owned (except my diesels) and never had a problem. Over 30 vehicles in 15 yrs. But, on my Cummins Turbo Diesel I run a WIX Oil Filter, WIX Fuel/Water Separator, and a Fleetguard Air Filter. After seeing the cut-away WIX/FRAM comparison above, I might just use WIX on everything from here on out.

 

I love five pages of people saying the same exact thing. Ahhhh, the need to add "my two cents".

 

Yah, we ran a fleet of 200 school buses and 110 support cars/trucks/vans. We ran Baldwin filters. Fram couldnt supply every type we needed, They had several that had improper threads specced and lastly we had a LOT of seam leaks.

We tried twice in 5 years because of the price difference, but no change in their quality. Be ware.....

 

During the winter I used to have wally world change my oil since I did not want to move a car out of the garage and I was putting 3000 miles on my truck a month,on the way to work I noticed people not staying behind me very long and noticed smoke rolling from under the truck and it was the fram filter wally world put on it had started to leak so no more Fram oil filters. Jeff