What is all this crying about K&N filters?

Serge,

The only real problem with a K&N is with the over oiling of the filter assembly. This seems to be a hit or miss thing during manufacturing, and then when it gets cleaned, most owners do not know how much oil to spray back on, thinking a lot is better than a little...............Otherwise nothing wrong with the K&N unit...............

Bill S.

Serge wrote:

Serge... I can see that you and Michael are pretty much cut from the same cloth..... What may be an appropriate filter in your area may NOT be an appropriate filter in another. Aside from some of the "magic" inferred in K&Ns advertising, at least one of you people must realize that what may be normal for someone in a verdant area will be quite alien to someone used to scrub grass and mud.

Choosing an old technology filter (the K&N is, in effect, an oil bath filter) is a decision that requires a lot of thought on the part of the purchaser..... there is no blanket statement that can be made regarding different environmental and climatic conditions when the venue is spread over an entire continent.

In your area, you have good experience with such a crude filtering method..... where I live, something like this will provide an early demise to your motor. I fail to see why some are so single minded in their own brand of truth.... the K&N is a very crude filter. While it works acceptably in SOME areas, there are MANY areas that "feature" a higher airborne particulate concentration. These airborne particles can and will pass through crude filter mediums.

While those in your area may receive thousands upon thousands of troublefree miles, those in my area will be writing cheques for thousands and thousands....... no conjecture, no maybe..... this engine is dusted. Not just one motor, not two motors but a fairly regular parade...... paper filters = no problems....... "high flow" filters = bring money.... again this is in my area.... a dusty area.

You dorks are blind in your quest to convert people to K&N and their ilk....... I'm saying use some common sense. Especially in light of K&Ns lack of any type of micron rating regarding filter performance....... please don't trot out that "the dirtier they get the better they get" crap. The dirtier they get, the more restrictive they get. Additionally, the dirtier a paper filter gets, the better it gets regarding micron size.

Those that want a K&N for their daily driver simply because someone said "they're trick" are mindless...... those that recommend K&N regardless of the local conditions are equally mindless.

For my purposes, this discussion is closed....... it's not my motor, it's not my wallet and I reserve the right to say "I told yous so" with a big, shit-eating grin on my face. If you wish to disregard the word of someone with 30+ years of experience, I will not quibble.... it's your choice. If you choose to turn a blind eye to the rest of the planet, thinking that your block is the mirror image of every other block on the planet, I will not quibble. If you choose an inappropriate filter, you WILL reap the rewards.....

'Nuff sed......... G'day folks......

uncommon...Gee...

Gee.. this thing is getting alot of emotional load...

I just don't give a shit about which brand of filter you use or any one else uses. My partner and I have been running jeeps in Reno and Vegas areas for years with K&N with no ill effect...they are pretty dusty areas and bad dust to...sand..

I think this whole thing about air filtering is a little anal...Most guys I know don't give it much thought as it's not usually a problem. Around here especially at the track...we go for flow.... many run without filters... I would agree with Bill that some people over do the oil in them and put them in soaked...thus potentially affecting air flow meters. But in my experience, you have to realy soak them to be a problem...

I just think this point is blown out of proportion...

Your mileage might vary...

Serge

Serge... the subject is closed for me..... you make your choice, I make mine....

I've been doing this since about 1968...... you're experience is????

I don't need a specific address but where do you drive that makes using a K&N so harmful? I would like to know just in case I move there one day. Is it in a stone quarry down wind from a rock crusher? Has your town ever heard of this new fancy stuff called asphalt? All kidding aside, I would really like to know where you drive and what are the environmental conditions.

Now why isn't a paper filter considered "old technology"? They have been around as long as I can remember and probably well before then. One company can say their paper is better than the next but it's still paper. I don't see where paper technology has set the filtering industry on fire. They use paper because it is cheap and it filters to OEM specs. There's nothing "new" about paper filters.

Once again, please tell me where this place is that gobbles up car engines at a ferocious pace. If there's that much airborne pollutants and dust in the air then you all should be wearing surgical masks.

All of us who have used K&N filters for literally hundreds of thousands of miles across the country without one filter related problem are dorks? The dirtier any filter gets the more restrictive it gets. That is just common sense knowledge. A K&N filters well within OEM specs as does paper filters but a K&N flows more air than a paper filter which is why people buy them. I'll even go as far as to say the paper filter will trap more dirt than a K&N but the difference is negligible in regard to engine longevity.

And those that ignore numerous PERSONAL testimonials from K&N users are equally mindless.

It's going to be many many miles before you get to say I told you so. What is the mileage limit on saying it, 130k, 154k, 194k miles? There comes a mileage point where you have to say the filter had no impact on engine longevity. I'll put my 154k miles of PERSONAL experience up against your 30 years, and zero miles, experience any day regarding K&N filters. I have yet to hear where a K&N filter killed an engine prematurely due to poor filter efficiency. I'm still waiting for someone to step up and be the first to tell their own personal K&N horror story. Is that noise I hear crickets?

Jim, if this makes you a happy man then God bless you. ;)

Well, I can't resist either....so here is my take.

I'll concede the following -

It is entirely possible that a modified engine will produce more power at WOT throttle when a K&N is installed in place of the OEM paper filter.

Now here is what I really think -

I personally doubt that the increase in power will be statistically significant, but some people will kill for 2 or 3 horsepower. People do all sort of interesting things in search of a few horsepower. Of course if the engine is heavily modified, then maybe the K&N will be of more benefit, but so would a larger paper filter.

K&N used to include formulas on their web page for calculating the proper size K&N filter for a particular application. They were thoughtful enough to include the filter factor for paper filters as well. I ran through the calculations using their formulas and their filter factor for a good paper filter and discovered that the paper filter on my Mustang was already three times as large as K&N's formula claimed was necessary. Of course a K&N filter of the same size as the paper filter would have been 3.5 times as big as it needed to be, but I doubt the difference would have been detectable.

The "cost" advantage of K&N filters is was over stated. I suppose if you kept the K&N filter for 150,000 miles and only serviced it at the K&N recommended intervals, then maybe you would save a few pennies. However, to save this money you have to spend a lot of time cleaning and re-oiling the K&N filter, vs dumping the paper filter (and all the dirt it has collected) in the trash.

I feel certain that K&N filters allow more dirt into an engine than a good paper filter of the same size. Whether this adversely affects the life of the engine or not depends on lot of other factors. I had a good friend who had a British car with Weber carburetors. The only filter these had were some wire baskets over the intake horns. The car was still running fine at 60K miles. Does this prove wire baskets are a superior filtering media.....I don't think so.

I distrust K&N advertising. It has too many weasel words and the "million mile warranty" is a joke. I'd love to know how many helicopter and tank filters K&N is selling to the government (or governments). One, two, a thousand, ten thousand???? Government bureaucrat are probably not more intelligent than car lovers in general, so I can believe that they tried a K&N filter on a helicopter. I doubt that it would be a popular choice in the long run. I know I will never try a K&N filter on any of my farm tractors. I've lived long enough that I remember how worthless oil bath fitters were in dusty conditions.

If you look around the internet you can find all sorts of filter comparisons. Some show oiled rag filters as great, some show oiled foam filters as terrific. All the test seem to show that paper filters are second best. Somebody is cooking the results.

I don't believe that a K&N filter will provide superior gas mileage when compared to a new paper filter on a properly maintained modern fuel injected engine.

I distrust all tests that compare a freshly cleaned an oiled K&N to an old paper filter. I'd like to see a test where each filter was installed and run under normal conditions for a couple of months and a few thousand miles before being tested for air flow and filtering efficiency. Even K&N admits that their filters remove more dirt when dirty. But I'll bet they conduct the flow test with a nice clean filter. I also wonder how the filter efficiency holds up over a long period of time. I have to believe that the oil coating has to dry out and be less effective after 3 or 4 months. I believe that at some point the K&N air filter stops being sticky fibers and starts being a restrictive hole filter like a paper filter - minus all the pleats.

As far as I can tell the single biggest "advantage" to a K&N air filter is an increase in induction noise. This is even more true for the FPIK. A lot of people confuse noise with power.

People can over oil K&N filters and this can lead to MAF problems. Not everyone does it even one time, but some people do it sometimes. Just another failure point.

In summary, I see K&N air filters as providing very little real benefit while they introduce additional risk factors. For most people, this means they are a bad idea. I am sure there are many happy K&N filter users and I wish them well...but, I'd sure like to do a double blind test to see if they really can tell the difference. Anyone car to finance a statistically valid comparison test? I think I could do one for a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

Regards,

Ed White

Aww. See, and I just came to the party. I've been using K&N's for several hundred thousand miles in the high desert of Albuquerque, NM. For two years I ran a ram air that ingested air from about 5 inches off the road. The filter used to get caked with *rocks* and the pleats would fill up with dust. That motor is still running just fine.

You'll have to produce a ton of objective data to convince me that K&N's are detrimental. There may be better, I think there are better, but K&N makes a decent product AFAIC.

Unfortunately, when Mars is close to Earth as it is now, there are often dust storms that blanket the planet with dust via 600mph winds. I would not use a K&N, even if my car could breath C02. :)

-Rich

Can we be sure that terrorism and WMD will join together? If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive.

-Tony Blair

Slave Lake..... northern Alberta. Major industries are oilfield and logging. The clay breaks up into a fine powder that can hang in the air for hours. Additionally, ash from forest fires can present a real problem when nature turns nasty.

For the record, there's some of this stuff can make it past even top quality paper filters. As for Keiths "Mars" comment, well we can just take that for where it comes from....

Once more from the top....... switching to an oil bath air filter is an important decision that needs careful thought. My experience with these filters (and I have probably seen more installations than most) shows me that they are inappropriate for some conditions. Too many owners are lax in their service routines and these types of filters don't stop what a paper filter can stop.

Someone will trot out the "as they get dirty, they filter better..." line. Doesn't that strike anyone as odd? Buy a K&N because it flows better and then let it plug off so it filters better? I think most guys buy them because of the looks more than anything else.

Personally, the ease and convenience (not to mention efficiency) of a paper filter is hard to beat. If I'm looking for horsepower, there are a lot better places to find it.

-- Jim Warman snipped-for-privacy@telusplanet.net

If K&Ns are so bad what is good?

uncommon...Gee...

Ed, I did a test with newly serviced filters and new paper / fiberous filters. It wasn't as long a duration as you'd like, but you may find it interesting.

Anyway, the new "paper" filters really aren't paper anymore. That is why I refer to them as paper / fiberous. There is a lot more to the modern filter than the classic oil bath / paper argument. In my research it appears the very first filters were steel mesh / oil bath in nature. I wish I'd have taken pictures of the 352 FE truck stock air filtering system. It was crude and very ugly.

In the '60s and '70s all sorts of new filtration types sprung up like the oil bathed foam and paper. Well the oil bathed foam extended to oil bathed cotton gauze. The paper filters are being made from more complex fiber matrixes every decade. What a "paper" filter is now is definitely not what they were even 5 years ago. Go open a paper filter box and look for yourself.

The funny part about all of this is that the differences in flow from one filter to another of appropriate size are insignificant. Based on that fact, one should pick a filter based on its ability to serve its purpose, and that is filtration. If you place power above filtration, then just throw your air filter in the garbage all together and all of the stock induction tubing as that is where the real restrictions lie.

AnthonyS

Yup, my experience too...

I just want to point out that changing the filter to a KN gives you the opportunity to change the stock filter/air box combo for a more efficient (more filtering surface) conical filter. Thus increasing filtering survace/flow...

Granted a paper conical filter (if I could find one) would give me increased flow over stock as it would also increase the filtering surface. But a KN makes it easy and cheep to upgrade your filtering system. If your car is stock, granted you should save your money for other mods...

I am not going to snuff/choke my precious engine which cost me many dollars with a paper filter. No way dude. I want every drop of HP it can produce...

Just 2 cents.

Serge

My experience with K&N is very good. How about yours? Having fun yet?

Cheer up man, I love you too...

Serge

Yep, 101... Now you need to realize inspite of the fancy ads, the K&N has less holes, they are larger, and whether or not they are filled with oil is pretty insignificant.

blah, blah, blah.... You've watched one too many TV commercial.

Most OEM filters have a much larger surface area than a K&N and many more much smaller holes.

Any dirt particle isn't sub atomic sized. It is actually composed of a large number of atoms. If you can see it or evidence of it, then it surely isn't subatomic. And while dust won't make an engine explode, it isn't good for longevity either or engines would be assembled in the Sahara and not clean rooms.

holes...how

unavoidable

Hold the K&N up to a light. See the holes the light is clearly coming through? They aren't sub-atomic in size.

-Rich

Can we be sure that terrorism and WMD will join together? If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive. But if our critics are wrong and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in face of this menace, when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive.

-Tony Blair