Re-usable / Performance Air Filters

[ntsqd]

The Donaldson swirl type filter is what off hiway heavy equipment mostly use, w/ or w/o the cyclone inlet. The UMP (Unique Metal Products) filters used almost exclusively in desert racing (excepting those sponsored by other filter brands) are Donaldson filter elements in a very nice spun aluminum housing. Biggest issue with them is finding room to fit them.

Some of the mid sized trucks (Hino, Mitsu, Isuzu, etc.) use a smaller version of this filter type that is wholly disposable (element & plastic hsg). I'm not all that fond of that concept, but the filtration won't suffer for it.

 

[Jeep]

I have a friend who shipped his Land Rover over to South Africa for a 4 month driving tour. He had a low mileage engine with K&N filter. The early part of the tour was through diamond mine country and a month into it his cylinder walls were badly scored from dust getting through and he needed a new engine. He got a quick swap then continued on with a stock LR air filter without problems.

I went to a Donaldson air filter and prefilter just to keep the solids out of my engine.

That is a very real problem with the K&N filters, there have been many destroyed diesels in Albertas oilfields because of dusting. We use Donaldson on our 6x6 and 4x4 floatation trucks, AFE Pro Gaurd 7 on our 1 ton diesels, and now S&B is making an 8 layer element as well. Just for comparison the last K&N that we had in here passing dirt was only 4 layers of filter media and the intake tube to the turbo was very dirty.

 

[dieselcruiserhead]

I read a study several years ago by a mining company with hundreds of piece of equipment that did the math with paper versus replacement and the cost of a reusable filter would have saved them over 100K a year. So they conducted a study on the effictiveness of K&N filters specifically and the performance loss/level of protection was massive with the K&Ns to the point that they scrapped them entirely and went back to paper despite the cost. I wish I had a link to the study, but it was truly startling. It was very interesting to see real world numbers. That said I read stories about peoples vehicles being locked up in the middle of nowhere with clogged air filters and the K&N, simple clank it out and reoil and you can still enjoy yourself and/or get to where you are going. Racor brand has a very high quality of filtration on everything they sell specifically fuel filters so I wouldn't be surprised if the performance on these was exceptional...

 

[ntsqd]

Side Note regarding Racor filters for those with diesels:
This bit me. Salinas, CA to Ventura @ max 35 mph was not fun. The Racor's with a paper element can soak up water to the point that they look good, but will NOT pass large volumes of fuel. If the engine won't pull RPM's that it used to, or won't make the power that it used to at that elevation, replace the element.

 

[DaveInDenver]

That said I read stories about peoples vehicles being locked up in the middle of nowhere with clogged air filters and the K&N, simple clank it out and reoil and you can still enjoy yourself and/or get to where you are going.

Uh, yeah, who travels without spare filters? If the trip is going to be longer than a weekend, I'd probably even have 2 spare sets of filters. Heck, even with a K&N, you need to carry either a spare filter or the cleaning kit, so it's not like a reusable filter really saves you space anyway.

 

[TeriAnn]

. Biggest issue with them is finding room to fit them.

It took me a couple months thinking about it, measuring spaces on my rig and wading through Donaldson pdf catalogue files.

I finally decided to mount mine to the underside of the front right wing and picked the longest narrow dia one that would fit & that you could replace the element without dropping the filter and that had acceptable flow characteristics for my engine size & operating RPM range. I ran the intake through the top of the wing and added one of those see through self cleaning spinning prefilters. Hopefully the precleaner will save me some element money.

I drive too many dusty trails to trust my engine to a filter that doesn't keep the dust out.

I'm listening to a random music ipod shuffle as I'm typing and Navajo flute music just started playing. I suddenly have this longing to be back in the 4 corners.