The oil filter is your engine’s first and most important line of defense. Responsible for—you guessed it—filtering out harmful debris and particles, it plays a vital role in the health of any motor. It turns out what type of oil filter you use is just as important as using one.
The Total Seal Piston Rings YouTube channel put together a fun and scientific analysis comparing an all-metal “screen” wire mesh-type oil filter to a traditional paper-based filter. Using one of its bench-testing V-8s, it pre-mixed iron particles into the oil and ran the engine with both filters. The goal was to see which filter would pick up more of the iron over a set of runs to redline. The fewer particles of iron left in the engine, the better.
The results are decisive. While the paper filter was able to filter out a sizable 85 percent of particulates present in the oil, the metal-based filter was only able to filter away 9 percent of the particles present. Yikes.
That’s down to the depth of the paper itself, says host Lake Speed Jr. The paper’s membrane-like material allows it to do a better job filtering versus the metal, which can only catch particles down to a certain size. After that, it’s not catching anything.
The testing had some serious real-world effects on the engine, too. In an hour of running the engine on a bench dyno with the paper filter, no power from the engine was lost. But with the metal filter, the engine lost 10 horsepower in one hour of running, indicating some pretty serious wear at places like the piston rings.
So while those metal screen filters might look fancy and high-tech, they’re very likely doing more damage than good for your engine.