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Air Filters
With the prices of vehicles these days you want the best engine protection and the absolute best protection is with synthetic motor oils.
One of the most frequently asked questions that we get via our e-mail is whether or not our viewers should be using synthetic motor oils. There are a lot of properties that motor oils are rated and tested for and one of them is pour point. In a nutshell pour point refers to the ability of the motor oil to pour or be liquid enough to lubricate the engine at low temperatures, so the lower the pour point the better. When it comes to pour point, synthetic motor oils are still quite liquid at minus 40 Celsius: they still will pour quite readily. All motor oilMost race cars don't use 'em for the simple fact that they offer a little bit of restriction to the engine. They hurt power slightly. But they do a lot for your passenger car or light truck in terms of keeping grit and dirt from entering the engine and wearing your engine out.
There's two styles of air filters that are commonly used on today's cars. I'll take the wingnut off and we'll have a look at the older style of air filter that this vehicle uses. It's a pleated paper filter in a cylindrical fashion and, by pleating the paper, it gives you a lot of filtering surface area in a minimum amount of space. All the dirt should be either in the filter or on the outboard side of the filter. If you ever see dirt inboard of the filter, you've either got the wrong filter or a torn or defective air filter.
Let's go over to the other vehicle and have a look at the second style. Most late-model vehicles use a panel-type air filter. This Suzuki has four little clasps to keep the two sides of the air cleaner housing together. And you're going to see why they call it a panel when I take it out: it's because of the shape of it. This is the clean side of the air filter: you can see that no dirt has gotten past it. But when I flip it over, you can see that this filter has already stopped lots of dirt from entering the engine. Here it is, trapped up here on the filter media.
On a good quality filter, you'll have a nice seal around the outside and a certain amount of rigidity to the filter itself, so that when you put it in there it's going to fit and sit properly in the bottom half of the air cleaner housing and the soft seals will prevent any dirt from getting past it.
In some vehicles, instead of the filter sitting horizontal like this, it'll sit on its edge or vertical. If you've got a vehicle like that, when you take the filter out for inspection, be very careful that any grit that was in the filter didn't fall down and get ingested into your engine when you restart it. Every time you take a filter out that's on its edge, you should take a Shop Vac and clean the lower half of the housing of this dirt and grit that you see in here. You don't want it to get drawn back in the engine when you restart it.
With the panel-type air filters like the Suzuki uses, usually won't have fit problems, but you may have problems with the filter if you don't get a good quality one in terms of its rigidity and the seals around the edge.
In the cylindrical-type air filters, it's a different story. The other day, we had a customer bring a used vehicle in that had piston rings that were worn out and we were trying to figure out why until we got to the air filter, and we found that he had the incorrect air filter. The one in my right hand was in his vehicle. The one in my left hand is the one it should've had and you can see the difference in the height. When I put them together like this, you can see that the diameter was bang on, but that height was the problem. So that inch of height that it was missing off the filter allowed unfiltered air to bypass the filter, go right into the engine and wear out the piston rings in only a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers.
We happen to know that, in this particular vehicle, the engines are typically lasting three to four hundred thousand kilometres and sometimes more if they have good filtration. So it's very important that you get the right filter and a quality one. In many cases, the right part number for the filter is written right on the housing, or it's in your owner's manual, or you can get a parts guy to look up the correct filter for you.
But don't match up with what came out or you may duplicate the problem and that's probably the problem that our customer had with his vehicle. One guy made a mistake early on in its life and then successive service people just matched up against the wrong air filter and kept putting the wrong one in there. On these cylindrical types that's easy to happen, because you can see how the diameters are very similar but heights are different. So make sure you're getting a quality air filter, installed correctly, and check that fit and make sure you get the right one. It's very important.
'Til next week, I'm Bill Gardiner for Motoring 2002.
thickens to some extent as the temperature decreases. That is a normal and expected condition and it's unavoidable. How much it thickens can often be the difference between the engine getting started or not getting started in sub-zero temperatures and whether or not the engine sustains any damage on start up on that minus 20 or 30 morning.
If you live in an area of this country where the ambient is consistently below minus 15 Celsius, you should think about using synthetic motor oil because it will give you much better engine protection and it may be the difference between getting that thing started on a minus 15 degrees morning and not getting it started or should your block heater fail or wasn't plugged in. This is one key area where synthetic oils are clearly ahead of the rest of the conventional motor oils. You're going to pay twice as much for a litre of synthetic motor oil but when you pay what cars cost these days, I think $6.00 or $6.50 isn't too much to pay for the motor oil to give you the kind of protection you need.
The other question that people ask is: "is it ok to use it in my particular vehicle?" Well, mileage doesn't always have to be the factor. When I bought my used pick-up truck it was in excess of 300,000k and I switched to synthetic motor oils with no problems at all. However, if your engine is burning oil, leaking oil or it has signs of major engine problems: in other words low engine pressure or knocking, don't switch to synthetic before you repair the wear and tear on the engine or replace the engine. It's not for an engine that already has problems. If your engine is making good oil pressure, not burning oil, not losing oil, and sounds good there is no reason why you can't switch and reap the benefits of synthetic motor oil.
Till next week I'm Bill Gardiner for Motoring.
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