The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Engine Shop Reusable oil filter cartridge?

I have seen stainless steel micron mesh permanent oil filters that can be cleaned in a ultrasonic cleaner. It appears that most of these are for motorcycles, ATV's and snowmobiles. Does anyone make these filter cartridges for automobile applications, particularly cartridges that fit both the Fram and AC oil filter canisters?

Tim

The ones I've seen are flat screens sandwiched between aluminum plates with very small dimension filter screens. When an old style canister filter element is disassembled, there are many square feet of available surface area. I can't imagine the small mesh screens running very far without clogging and becoming worse than useless.
Jerry

I have an old Frantz toilet paper filter set-up. Kinda hesitant to use it though,,,,,,
especially with todays toilet paper.

I use tp in my air line filter. It gets wet but still works without disintegrating.

Found a company that makes the reusable stainless steel micron mesh filters, but nothing to fit our canisters...Fram or AC. K&P Engineering is the company I found on the web. Any further ideas? Cost prohibitive?

Denny, if you read this... maybe we could design and make these?

Tim

I'm with Jerry, although an interesting idea I think a stock paper filter element is the safer bet.

If they can fit the same area of metal mesh/screen filter material as the stock paper filter then it'll probably be difficult to fully clean.
If they don't put as much material in then chances are it does not flow as much as stock paper filter, or can't hold as much dirt, and or it doesn't catch as small a particles as stock.

Grigg

My wife had a 2001?? Toyota that had a screen filter, That looked like a coffee filter, A plastic framing with screen windows, Looked like nylon screen very fine
It fit in a screw caped hole cast in the front of the block, Unscrew cap pull out screen replace screen screw in cap you are done. No need to crawl under car and get oily.The car did use 5w-30w.easy pumping and probably still has a pressure relief.
To do a chev canister, A screen tube covered ends with grommets to slide over central tube. would need to be as large a diameter [for flow] as possible and be stout enough to not collapse. HMMMMMMMM
BUT if you really want to keep you're oil clean filter the intake of the oil pump.
Thinking about stuff like this does not help my smoking habit AT ALL.

Anybody else remember the "filter" on the air cooled Volkswagen engines? It was a dome-shaped circular screen around the oil pump pickup tube at the bottom center of the crankcase with the drain plug in the center of the filter cover. It was about as worthless as an air freshener in an outhouse!
Jerry

Some military vehicles from the early 50's used a "Cuno" filter which had various plates inside. The idea was to just turn the
handle on the top and it would brake up the chunks and they would fall to the bottom. I think they were also used on aircraft.
They could also fall into the "air freshener" category.
Fred

Hey now! That was a great filter. It kept all of the 1/8" square bits of piston skirt out of the oiling system in my '73 Bug. Well, for as long as I had any pistons left in the engine anyway...

That is a regular filter cartridge, not really a screen filter. Replaced plenty of them over the years.

The 1937 American LaFrance V-12 I have has a Pur-o-lator reusable oil filter on it. It is essentially a stack of round brass shim stock in alternating layers in a pattern to produce a cylinder with some gaps a few thousandths tall and wide all over it. It filters out things like rocks, sticks and the small birds that carried in the rocks and sticks. I'm not sure its terribly effective at filtering out particles that could be damaging...On the bright side, once the oil leaves the filter on that engine it does pass through an oil to water cooler, so at least you have cool oil with small chunks circulating back into the engine.

From the outside it looks like a canister filter attached to the top side of the oil cooler. The brass element fits over a hollow tube and works similar the bypass filters commonly found on our GM engines, but with a larger hole to allow full flow.