Bear Trap Filter Magnet

[eurocarrera]

Has anyone used one of these before - I found nothing in the archives. They were recommended on this guys web site:
http://www.chris-longhurst.com/carbibles/engineoil_bible.html
and he said that he was able to actually see the particles built up inside the filter after he cut open his hand.

The Bear Trap:
http://www.thebeartrap.com/

[Formerly Steve Wilkinson]

I used to use the same sort of thing in my airplane engine, although the magnets were internal. (It had a relatively sophisticated cleanable-element removable filter that I had installed rather than the standard Champion paper spin-on type filter.)

Whenever I removed and cleaned the filter element every 25 hours, there was enough iron-particles sludge on the magnets to about cover a dime, maybe a nickel. That's metal that would otherwise have been caught by the filter--ideally--or continued coursing through the engine with the oil supply.

The principle of the magnets is simple enough--that they trap and hold the iron particles and prevent them from continually circulating--that I can't imagine a negative effect other than the minor purchase price. It's not like they're saying, "We align the juju of the particles so they become harmless," they simply trap and hold 'em. Maybe somebody else can tell me why this is bad.

Of course, with airplane engines, which are vastly more crucial than is a pull-over-and-park 911 engine, we do all sorts of stuff like carefully cutting open a standard Champion spin-on filter and stretching out the paper element to its full four-yard length and examining every crease in the oily paper to determine whether the tiny pieces are bronze, burnt-carbon particles, copper, ferrous stuff or whatever. Maybe we 911 people shoudl do that routinely as well...

Stephan

[sammyg2]

Uhhhhhmmmm..... what size were these particles? If you are worried about saving your engine from these particles you are either running too course of a filer in micron rating or the particles are too small to be concerned with.
IMNSHO, anything under 5 microns will not do enough wear to measure over the lift of the engine. Anything larger than that will be caught by a good filter, even without magnets.

[Formerly Steve Wilkinson]

Well, we can argue all day about what size the particles were, but if it costs me $1.98 (or whatever) to trap them and I'm not actively harming the engine by doing so, I don't see the downside. Am I actively helping the engine by letting them float free in the oil stream? If so, I'll let 'em go and do the, uh, polishing and lubricating that I guess they thus do.

Stephan

[eurocarrera]

So this then leads to the question of what really causes wear - is it:
* metal to metal wear at startup
* the rings wearing down the cylinder wall
* metal particles trapped between moving parts, and they eventually wear down

I am just going through this "fascination" phase right now as to why we spend so much money on lubrican't when a lot of them offer very similar properties, and do the exact same thing? It kind of goes back to the "nature vs. nurture" debate, but applied to Porsche cars. What if we took two exact 1985 Porsche engines with 10,000 miles on them each. They each had perfect service records, and they were each auto-x 10 times per year.

* Person A uses Mobil 1 engine oil, with Swepco in the transmission

* Person B uses regular name brand oil (let's say valvoline 20-50), with regular gear oil (also Valvoline 80-90w)

The engines are run to 100,000 miles, and both engines have the oil changed every 3,000 miles. Pefect service records are kept for both cars.

Which one has the most wear?

[N11Porsche]

Consumer Reports did just that. They took several brand new, New York City taxi's and put Mobil One in one of them and a high-grade dino oil in the other and a cheapo brand oil in the third. They changed oil and filters regularly and after 100,000 miles the took the engines apart and measured everything for wear, etc. The test showed that the engine with the high grade dino oil had no more wear then the engine with the Mobil One oil.

When I get the time, I will see if I can find the issue with the test and give you more specifics......

[eurocarrera]

Do we just like to throw away money then? I certainly don't. I think that if we just used regular dino oil, and changed it every 3 - 5,000 miles, we could spend our moeny on other stuff (toys?). Aren't thr byproducts of oil water and carbon (or something else), so even if you are using Mobil 1, why would someone want to go more than 5,000 miles when the by products would be harming the engine? Isn't this a false hope, and a huge misnomer on our part (me included) since we are led to believe that we can change our oil less by using a synthetic. Do synthetic oils somehow dispense of the by products, or do they store them just like other oils?

[maxnine11]

regarding the consumer reports test. taxi-cabs RARELY get shut-off!! and we all know that most internal engine wear occurs at start up. that is one area where synthetic shines. the colder the climate, the more reason to use synthetic. ....okay, i'm done...back to the magnet discussion. max

[eurocarrera]

Couldn't you just use the correct viscostiy oil for the ambient temp. of your region?

OK, 1 vote in for engine wear at startup - I probably should have started a poll :-(
Thanks!

[sammyg2]

IMO neither one will show enough difference in wear to be able to measure using conventional measuing tools.

I remember reading that consumer digest did a similar test on a group of taxis several years ago.
They ran two identical taxis for something like 100,000 miles (can't remember all the details) one used regular oil, one used fancy oil additives. Both were maintained based on manufacturer's recommendations.
The engines were torn down and inspected, neither had more wear than the other.

I believe most wear is caused by either contaminated oil, abuse (over revving), or when the operating temperatures are not stabilized.
Parts do not heat up evenly and do not grow evenly, especially on an air cooled engine. Clearances can get tighter or looser.
If the engine is run really hard when cold there's a higher chance of undue wear occuring. Same can and does happen when an engine is overheated.

I also feel that changing oil every 3000 miles is overkill under normal circumstances and is directly traceable to a massive advertising campaign from the oil industry.
I change the oil in my Porsche at least that often but I drive it much harder than what I would call normal at times including DEs or AX's.

My current profession is a reliability engineer at an oil refinery. My job is to increase the mean time between failures on rotating equipment. I'm judged and/or rewarded depending on how many failures we have per month.
If I thought special oil oil or magnets on filters would help I would be using them. We do have magnetic drain plugs on some equipment but only on the machines that have an oil sump without a filter, like on centrifigual pumps, but no magnets on filters even when an overhaul of a machine costs $3 million or more.
One of these days I'll set up a test where we'll install magnets on filters and then measure the size of the particles trapped. It would be very difficult to try and prove that wear was decreased by doing this, it would take many years and would have to be duplicated on hudreds of pieces of identical equipment.

We use synthetic oil on many of our pumps but only the ones pumping very hot products. Normal turbine oil would coke up and synthetic doesn't at these elevated temperatures. On pumps with oil temperatures under 190 degrees F. standard turbine oil works just as well as synthetic oil.
We change the oil in most of our 1500 pieces of equipment every 3 months and most of them run 24 hours a day.
I'd like to increase that frequency but don't have the budget for it yet.

I recently completed a study that is soon to be published in a geeky trade magazine that shows over 79% of all rotating equipment failures (pumps, turbines, compressors, blowers and fans) are directly related to operating conditions other than what the machine was designed for, while only 17% are related to human error, improper design or construction, or lubrication.
The other 4% are undefined. No obvious root cause can be identified.

[maxnine11]

Bill, I do not use my Porsche cars in the dead of Canadian winter, but from experience with my other vehicles, I can tell how many seconds it takes for the pressure guage to pop up. the nice thing about the synthetic multi grades is that you can keep the high number high for when the engine is warm and working,(40 or 50) but still retain a '0' or '5' grade for the cold starts. i use castrol syntech 5-50 in my pickup. it has over 300,000 km on it. max

[eurocarrera]

What about this type of product than?
http://www.enginelube.com/TypesFrameSet.htm

Has anyone used one of these before? I would seriously consider this over the money I could save by not using synthetic oil.

[Sunroof]

Regardless of the taxi oil wear issue let me digress back to the magnetic micropartical pickup issue. These magnetic bands have been around for along time and they will hold metallic wear particles, and that cannot hurt............BUT, what I am plagued with now is after installing my "Cooler Collar" apparently their is no place for a magnetic pickup device. The magnets set too high off the filter when attached to the collar is rendered ineffective! If someone can jump on this and develop a "magnetic pickup cooler collar", just think of the possibilities?

On the other hand..................
Would'nt you think that the magentic oil drain plugs pick up enough micro-metal particles to handle the job?

Regards
Bob
73.5T

[eurocarrera]

Interesting article on this subject:
http://www.enginelube.com/vwporschearticle.htm

[sammyg2]

What they fail to take into account with the pre-lube system is that horizontally opposed engines, specifically Porsche dry sump engines, develop oil flow much faster than a chebby V8. On our engines the oil pump does not have to pull very hard to get oil from the tank. It's virually pre-primed by design. There's also a thin layer of oil laying in the cylinder bores unless the engine has been sitting for a real long time. A regular V8 has to generate enough suction to lift the oil from the sump, up to the pump, and then to the bearings and such. Also because of the near vertical design the oil will tend to drain off of the cylinder walls.
Besides, how often do we start an engine at zero degrees? Others in colder climates probably do but I never have. That test is only valid only in certain climate regions. I'd like to see the same test performed on Porsches under real world conditions (at least real world for most of us, like 50 or 60 degrees instead of zero).

Using magnets and pre-lubers will not hurt your engine. They will probably help although the amount of difference they make could be arguable.

I like the idea of a magnetic drain plug in the tank. That way if any particles settled in the tank they would be easier to control although that's after the filter. Any crap in there would have to come from contamination from the cooler, past a bogus filter, or through the fill neck.

[Hetmann]

Magnets only attract ferrous particles. A lot of the surfaces that wear in a 911 engine are not ferrous.

[eurocarrera]

Well something has to be made up of a magnetic substance in our engines - what is that stuff that is attaching itself to my drain plug magnets then?

Additionally, this begs another question - are the filters that we are using filtering enough of the non-ferrous particles which could be causing our engines harm?

sammyg2, point well taken, but to add to that, when are engines are stopped, at what level are the pistons being bathed in oil, is it half of the piston, or the entire piston - don't our crankcases only hold about 4 quarts - if that.