Every now and then a wonderful new way to service vehicles opens up a pandora's box of undesireable consequences. In the day, oil filters were contained in a heavy can with a thru bolt to hold it on, and were a mess to change. Voila! the spin on filter was invented, a labor saving device that allowed the maintenance of filters by simply spinning them off and the new one on!
Still messy. And, being outside the engine, exposed to off road damage, along with the more pressing problem of coming loose. Now, how does a filter do that when it's screwed on then turned another quarter to half turn? Beats me. So do engines with bad bearings. And if said vehicle is in a hot competition race with the first clue of the issue smoke and flames coming from under the hood? Well, the Honda S2000 racing group has had a few, some reports over 6 known since the oil then sprays back onto the exhaust manifold. They ginned up a "filter lock."
Use a "no hub coupling" for plumbing, link for HD below. It's a corrugated stainless wrapper with two hose clamps and a neoprene sealing liner, which can be modified. In the case of a F150 with 4.2 V6, I'm removing the lower hose clamp, notching the sheet metal to go around the filter extension casting so that it can't rotate, then hose clamping it to the filter. You may or may not need the liner. Point being, investigating a oil leak, the filter was found loose, again, and the techs working on it noted they had found the same on the local PD cruisers doing this, too. The only common item with all this is synthetic oil seems a lot more slippery than oil used to be decades ago. Better safe than sorry.
A hose clamp with some kind of flat stock "finger" to lock it against rotation is sold in race catalogs, it's a matter of exercising ingenuity to keep these wonderful spin on filters from doing what they do best - spinning off when you don't want it. While it may seem a bit overprotective to add a lock if nothing like that has ever happened, for those of us who have had to deal with it, marking territory for a week and then discovering it's 4 quarts low is not good. I even discovered that the '99 Forester AWD transmission has a spin on. That was an interesting replacement when it locked up in 2d gear.
Still messy. And, being outside the engine, exposed to off road damage, along with the more pressing problem of coming loose. Now, how does a filter do that when it's screwed on then turned another quarter to half turn? Beats me. So do engines with bad bearings. And if said vehicle is in a hot competition race with the first clue of the issue smoke and flames coming from under the hood? Well, the Honda S2000 racing group has had a few, some reports over 6 known since the oil then sprays back onto the exhaust manifold. They ginned up a "filter lock."
Use a "no hub coupling" for plumbing, link for HD below. It's a corrugated stainless wrapper with two hose clamps and a neoprene sealing liner, which can be modified. In the case of a F150 with 4.2 V6, I'm removing the lower hose clamp, notching the sheet metal to go around the filter extension casting so that it can't rotate, then hose clamping it to the filter. You may or may not need the liner. Point being, investigating a oil leak, the filter was found loose, again, and the techs working on it noted they had found the same on the local PD cruisers doing this, too. The only common item with all this is synthetic oil seems a lot more slippery than oil used to be decades ago. Better safe than sorry.
A hose clamp with some kind of flat stock "finger" to lock it against rotation is sold in race catalogs, it's a matter of exercising ingenuity to keep these wonderful spin on filters from doing what they do best - spinning off when you don't want it. While it may seem a bit overprotective to add a lock if nothing like that has ever happened, for those of us who have had to deal with it, marking territory for a week and then discovering it's 4 quarts low is not good. I even discovered that the '99 Forester AWD transmission has a spin on. That was an interesting replacement when it locked up in 2d gear.
