Td5Alive foam air filters - opinions

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I drove in all manner of conditions on all manner of roads from wet and foggy to dry and dusty.

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With respect P6B your experience in maybe driving along the occasional dirt road is VERY different to following a road train for 2 hours along the Tanami.

I used a Unifilter sock in my snorkel and found it great, ending up filthy on the intake side and clean on the engine side and my paper filter lasted the entire 18KK . Although I found I had to change the sock the day after my road train experience and usually once a week..
I tend to think foams are not too bad , or not as bad as K&N cloth filters anyway if oiled correctly.
However there is another issue in that MAFs do not like oil.
Regards Philip A

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Originally Posted by PhilipA

With respect P6B your experience in maybe driving along the occasional dirt road is VERY different to following a road train for 2 hours along the Tanami.

I used a Unifilter sock in my snorkel and found it great, ending up filthy on the intake side and clean on the engine side and my paper filter lasted the entire 18KK . Although I found I had to change the sock the day after my road train experience and usually once a week..
I tend to think foams are not too bad , or not as bad as K&N cloth filters anyway if oiled correctly.
However there is another issue in that MAFs do not like oil.
Regards Philip A

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Unifilters I think would be great prefilters.

Although I'd also look into the Donaldsons also. I think the newer ones will also self clean by spinning the dust out of the bowl.

Slunnie, I actually bought a Donaldson "Topspin" several years ago, and it got broken in a house shift. I later repaired it with epoxy but then I got nervous that on a V8 on light cruise throttle it would not spin fast enough to do any good.
While a diesel sucks all the time a V8 just gently inhales on light throttle.
I didn't realise this when I bought it.
So I bought the Unifilter socks and still have the Topspin on the top shelf.
Regards Philip A

PhilipA wrote,..

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With respect P6B your experience in maybe driving along the occasional dirt road is VERY different to following a road train for 2 hours along the Tanami.

I used a Unifilter sock in my snorkel and found it great, ending up filthy on the intake side and clean on the engine side and my paper filter lasted the entire 18KK . Although I found I had to change the sock the day after my road train experience and usually once a week

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Hello PhilipA,

I agree with you that my experience is different to yours, in that I have not followed a road train along the Tanami, and I would have to ask..why would you want to?

If you had not used the sock before your paper filters, needless to say you would have been changing those daily or weekly as the case may be.

My point is that the foam filters proved to be more than adequate for the type of driving conditions that I encountered over a period of 19 years.
Each person will need to access for themselves whether or not a filter of a given type is suitable or not for their needs.

As you said yourself,..the foam filter kept the dust out.

Ron.

But P6B this is a 4wd forum.
While the poster may in fact never venture into the outback, I have to assume that he wants to know how they go in the harshest conditions.

I agree totally with you that they are fine for 2WD cars, especially carburetted ones .

However the first time I visited Wombeyan caves and saw the dust on the engine side of my K&N , I took it off.

The purpose of my post is just to help the poster avoid what is a costly mistake by detailing my experience.

Regards Philip A

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Originally Posted by RoverP6B

I used foam airfilters in my 3.5 litre Rover V8 powered car from 1988 till 2007, 19 years of service and 226,000km.

I drove in all manner of conditions on all manner of roads from wet and foggy to dry and dusty.

From my understanding, if an engine is injesting dust which the filters are allowing to pass, then this will see increased wear in the piston rings and bores resulting in increasing levels of blow by and ultimately a marked increase in oil consumption.

My engine never showed an increase in oil consumption, nor was there ever an indication of blow by increasing. When dismantled, the cylinder bores were smooth and free of abrasive wear. The rings were in fine condition for an engine that was 33 years old with a total of 327,000km covered.

I make this statement based on my own experience. At no stage in the 19 years that I used them did at any time I see anything that made me feel concern for the long term life of my engine. I was never aware of any negative press regarding these at the time, but the life of my engine I feel speaks for itself.

Ron.

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As has been pointed out, the concentration (and hence overall mass) of dust a car engine sees vs the concentration of dust an offroad vehicle or 4x4 sees are orders of magnitude apart.

Some old italian sports cars (and others) ran no filter at all, yet manage to last a few hundred thousand km.

A 3.5L rover V8 should have a lifespan of 400-500k km if looked after (apart from the cam/valves). 327k km is not a lot - why was your engine pulled down? I doubt you would have been easily able to quantify the presence or lack of increased wear on a sample size of 1, in relatively dust-free conditions.

the residue that comes out of them also takes out your intake side sensors.

not a problem on a 3.5 with a flapper... anything else tho.

isuzurover wrote,..

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A 3.5L rover V8 should have a lifespan of 400-500k km if looked after (apart from the cam/valves). 327k km is not a lot - why was your engine pulled down?

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Hello Ben,

I can recall speaking with the Service Manager of a Land Rover / Rover dealership in the mid 1980s on the longevity of the Rover V8. He said 300,000km was a typical lifespan. I also heard the same figure quoted by another two gents involved with Rover products.

When the engine was stripped, the camshaft was very heavily worn with a number of lobes down by 3mm compared to others, lifters and timing set were all totally had. The camshaft bearings had lost all their lining and the camshaft was running on the steel backing. The main and big end bearings displayed considerable copper across the full width of the shells.

Engine oil was always changed every 4000km or less. There was no evidence of sludge.

The reason the engine was pulled down was that power was far less than it used to be, as was oil pressure. Upon inspection the camshaft and timing set was the primary cause of the former, and then the state of the camshaft bearings revealed themselves, so not to replace them would have been a pointless exercise, and of course to do so the engine needs to come out.

With the new engine I shall do a top end rebuilt at about 160,000km and just keep on going.

Ron.

I don't think 375,000 km is very much.

My 1st rangie had over 250,000 miles (not km) on the 2nd time around the clock when I got rid of it.

The camshaft and timing chain are the 1st parts that wear out on the v8's.

The level of silica shown by engine oil analysis is the sure way to tell how much dust is getting through.

Ron, sounds like your engine was stuffed, did you have an oil analysis done to see why everything was so badly worn, sounds like excessive silica in the oil acting as grinding paste.
Here's a simple test to check air filters, hold them up to the sun and if you can see small shafts of light then it is useless, which will be the case with K&N and Foam filters.
Ron how many long-haul trucks do you see with Foam or K&N filters, don't you think that if there was a benefit from using these filters that the trucking industry would be using them, Regards Frank.