D
Dean Barker
Guest
Can any one remember the air filters on the 40's and 50's Chevys? The standard air filter was what we called the chore girl type. It looked like a wad of steel shavings soaked in oil. When it got dirty or when the engine oil was changed, the air filter was washed in gasoline, dried, and reoiled. Kinda like the K & N filters of today. Only one catch; you were lucky if the engine lasted 30,000 miles. I had a neighbor that purchased the optional oil bath air filter. His car was still running fine with no overhauls at 150,000.
I tried to find out the filtering efficiency (percent of the dirt removed) of the K&N filters a while back, but this information was not available. A short while back, a guy with a Dodge diesel pickup wrote in to the K&N website that his intake pipe between the K&N filter and his turbo was covered with dirt.
Farm tractors are now almost 100% turbo diesels that use huge amounts of air in very dusty conditions and all of them use paper filters. Most engines will run 6,000 to 20,000 hours in these conditions so the dirt is not getting thru the paper filters.
Most of us don't pick up a lot of dirt that goes into our air cleaners, but the little that does, we want to filter it out. I plan on keeping my paper filter in my corvette. When I went shopping for my Corvette, one of the things that I checked was that it still had the OEM paper filter. Hope this helps some of you guys make up your minds on whether to continue to use a paper filter or switch to a K&N.
I tried to find out the filtering efficiency (percent of the dirt removed) of the K&N filters a while back, but this information was not available. A short while back, a guy with a Dodge diesel pickup wrote in to the K&N website that his intake pipe between the K&N filter and his turbo was covered with dirt.
Farm tractors are now almost 100% turbo diesels that use huge amounts of air in very dusty conditions and all of them use paper filters. Most engines will run 6,000 to 20,000 hours in these conditions so the dirt is not getting thru the paper filters.
Most of us don't pick up a lot of dirt that goes into our air cleaners, but the little that does, we want to filter it out. I plan on keeping my paper filter in my corvette. When I went shopping for my Corvette, one of the things that I checked was that it still had the OEM paper filter. Hope this helps some of you guys make up your minds on whether to continue to use a paper filter or switch to a K&N.
