[FWDLK] Lubricate THIS....

Oil bath filters can be huge, expensive and high maintenance, especially on air hogs like gas turbines. Effective air filtration on gas turbines is critical to long life. Some of the best air filters on turbines is an advancing rollup screen of media with stickum on it to catch the finest of the fines. Two-stage filtration as discussed below has application in severe applications. Turbine performance is very sensitive to pressure drop across the filters, so the advancing rollup feature may be controlled by differential pressure across the screens. Dry-type and centrifugal air filters may only operate at maximum effectiveness over a narrow range of air flow and automotive engines must operate from idle to max RPM. Oil bath filtration may be more effective over the wide range of automotive engines.

The point has been made that oil-bath air cleaners require frequent and messy maintenance. Many of us have given baths to the components of the oil bath air cleaners in the solvent tank and usually found a lot of sludge in the base of the air cleaner. I don’t find that amount of silt in my dry air filters and am happy to periodically bathe and flush the two oil-bath air cleaners on my 1955 Chrysler 300.

Bottom line: Oil bath is a very effective, but not the cheapest filtration for automotive engines. However, dry-type cleaners do satisfactory work as long engine life is now the norm. Engines can and must actually be designed to “eat” a ton of dirt before they die.

Rich Barber

Brentwood, CA

1955 C-300 with DeltaWing or Batwing dual air cleaners for the factory dual quads.

From: Forward Look Mopar Discussion List [mailto:L-FORWARDLOOK@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Marv Raguse
Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2006 8:49 AM
To: L-FORWARDLOOK@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [FWDLK] Lubricate THIS....

In a message dated 7/30/2006 10:52:46 AM Eastern Daylight Time, peerless@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:

One of the major downfalls to long engine life was the introduction of the
paper element air filter. If you recall, from the mid 1950's back, almost
all internal combustion engines had oil bath air cleaners on them (even our
lawn mower did).

I beg to differ with Larry's opinion and base that on our military approach to filtering...For example on our military tanks with large mass flow rates such as turbines, filtering elements are used as are pre cleaners using centrifugal air separators. No oil baths are used even in desert maximum dust environments. At least in my experience. I believe the improved elements today do a great job. Even with Oil bath it required the air flow to change direction and dump the large particles into the oil. After a point the surface was saturated and more dirt made the turn into the inlet. If paper elements didn't work, the 150,000 to 200,000 + engine would not exist and they frequently do today. Other opinions please?

Marv