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I recently did an oil change and when I opened up the oil filter I found it was torn. One pleat was torn where it meets the bottom and top of the oil filter.
This obviously allowed unfiltered oil past the filter for an unspecified period of time. The oil filter was on for roughly 7000 miles.
How badly do you guys think the engine was damaged? If the engine was damaged let’s say something went between the bearings and the crank could it continue damaging even after I’ve done the oil change? For example right now the car seems fine could I expect it to get worse over time or suddenly die on me?
What could someone expect from damaged bearings? Let’s say dirt went between and it scored it? Do damaged bearings get worse over time more than normal wear? Does it reduce fuel economy? Will the engine blow up? Also could this have done lots of damage to the timing chain? Elongation?
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Honestly I wouldn’t worry about it. If you think of all the what if’s you’ll drive yourself crazy. Obviously it’s not ideal, but there are other filter elements there and it’s likely that there was only a small drop in filtration.
You are assuming that the engine is damaged and that assumption is probably false. The engines in modern cars are surprisingly resilient and a torn pleat in an oil filter over one oil change is unlikely to cause any long term damage.
Recently the turbo on my wife’s car failed and when we dropped the oil pan it was fully of dark, thick, chunky molasses type-oil. It’s taken three short oil + filter changes until the filter is mostly clean of black tar balls. Since we got this car used, the oil was circulating for god knows how long. The car now runs fine and does not consume excessive oil.
I would be more concerned about the condition of the oil itself. Was the color still somewhat translucent (good) or dark and opaque (bad)? Was there small chunks in it or was it free of particles? The oil acts as a lubricant, but also as a cleaner.
If it were me, I’d replace the filter with a good quality unit, fill with a high quality synthetic oil and call it a day. Then tighten up your oil changes to 3000-5000miles.
It’s entirely possible the filter damage was caused when you took it apart, and the engine could have been running on filtered oil all along. Besides, most filters feature a pressure relief valve. If oil pressure is too high, say on a cold winter start or if the filter is highly clogged, the relief valve opens, bypassing the filter element. The idea is that dirty oil is better than no oil at all.
Most people send unfiltered oil through their engine a lot more often than they realize, and things are fine. I wouldn’t burst a blood vessel over a small rip on one pleat of the filter.
So when I drained the oil it was clear brown on the dipstick. It wasn’t anywhere close to opaque or black. It looked to me like every other oil change I had done.
I had done two oil changes and a transmission fluid change between two Civics that day. On one of the fluid drains I remember seeing shimmering metal but I don’t remember which because I wasn’t counting on this to tear. I think it may have been from the transmission fluid change since it was the first time the trans fluid was changed for that car and I feel like if I saw it for engine oil I would have registered more alarm but I can’t be sure.
I am kicking myself because I usually save a sample for oil analysis and I forgot to do it that time when I needed one most.
As for whether I could have caused it, this filter is of a brand known for tearing (I only found out too late when it was already on my car for thousands of miles). If I had known beforehand I would have not used it at all. The filter is known to be defective and the tears happened at the same points most everyone else who uses them tears at and it was torn in a way that was impossible for me to have caused it. I used a chain exhaust cutter which is a fairly gentle way of opening it. There’s no way I could have tore it near the bottom of the filter since I opened it near the top. Also if I had tore it using the chain cutter, it would have cut through more than one pleat equally around the circumference of the filter but in this case it tore only one pleat deeply. You’d need to stab a knife in there for that kind of effect.
I still wouldn’t panic over it.
As for what will happen to this engine, there’s no way of knowing. Only time will tell. And if anything weird does happen, it’ll still largely be a matter of speculation if you try to link it to this incident.
Don’t worry, be happy, keep on truckin’.
I don’t believe anything was damaged. If there is bearing damage, a failure will not be sudden and you will get a progressively worsening noise beforehand. Only metal pieces or large amounts of carbon present in a very sludgy engine will damage bearings if they’re in the oil that is pumped between them. You timing chain wont stretch because of unfiltered oil, that has to do with the amount of carbon present in the oil (and not your problem as long your dirty oil is as reasonably clean as you think).
If your oil looked good, and your engine was not already producing metallic debris from a pre-existing internal failure, then you should not worry. The oil filter is nice for catching carbon particles and other such combustion debris, but it’s real benefit is to prevent metal being produced by a failure to get pumped around the rest of the engine. I have repaired many engines where the oil filter saved the rest of the engine from debris produced by a localized, repairable failure. I’ve also never had a engine come back knocking after an oil change where the filter was compromised on an otherwise good engine. Granted I don’t normally cut open filters, but I have seen a number of failed cartridge-style filters that never caused a problem.
I don’t get it though, aren’t all engines producing metallic debris? I did an oil analysis on the oil change before that and it was reporting that I had slightly higher iron in my oil than other people with the same engine. That filter wasn’t torn in that case so the only iron I am aware of is on Civics the blocks are aluminum but the cylinders are sleeved in iron. Then this must have been the engine producing metallic debris from the piston rings scraping the walls of the cylinder (even with any oil film left on the cylinders).
So if the last oil was being filtered properly and it still had iron debris floating in it, then I would have to assume that in the case of a failed filter that oil with iron in it would damage critical parts that would generate more wear metals which would do further damage. The longer the unfiltered oil circulates the damage would grow worse and worse faster since more wear metals are being loaded in it since the filtration is none (or compromised). I just don’t know enough about the flow characteristics of the oil to know how it would flow through the filter when one of the folded pleats is detached from its bottom base and top base and folded over. It’s as if the filter was in bypass for 7000 miles I guess? The gap caused by the pleat separating on the top and bottom are not as big as the bypass valve opening but the bypass valve only opens for seconds while this was there for at worst 7000 miles. I also don’t know if the oil is pressurized how much it would push on the pleat making the gap at the top and bottom wider. This is a pretty small engine so the pump is probably small.
I’m pretty much dreading this and expecting the engine to fail now. Pissed because I feel like I did everything right. I babied this car inside and out, did fluid changes and all maintenance (oil changes religiously) like I was supposed to and an oil filter that was supposed to be reliable failed and all of my effort was for nothing. Feel totally betrayed for trusting this company to make a damn oil filter properly. It’s a lesson learned for my next car, never buy aftermarket oil filters.
I agree with all who said you have nothing to worry about.
As for oil filters, having used OEM and Napa filters at the shop I used to work in, and having used parts store filters in the past on my own cars, I now exclusively use OEM filters (with the exception of my ’96 Jeep–I still use Napa filters on it). I buy them a case at a time online and they work out to be around the same (or less) price per each than parts store filters. Especially for anything 2005 and newer I recommend using only the OEM filters.
Carbon, and fuel/combustion by-products (blow-by) are the largest contaminants in engine oil. As for iron in the oil, the majority of that iron comes from the piston rings (and cylinder walls as the rings scrape them). The two compression rings in most stock engines are made of iron. Bearings are made with many metals, so when they wear the oil will contain amounts of iron (from steel), tin, nickel, copper, and sometimes zinc and aluminum. Performance engines use various parts containing chrome and molybdenum, so when those parts wear the oil will contain traces of those metals. With proper oil changes at regular intervals there should not be a significant amount of any of these in the oil.
Honestly I would just drive the car and stop worrying. When there is a big problem the car will let you know – you will get engine fault codes, strange noises that are hard to ignore, loss of fluids, car will run like sh*t or won’t run at all. Until then just drive and enjoy. Even on the remote chance the engine does fail at some point, Civics are a dime a dozen and you can probably pluck a used motor from a boneyard for a few hundred bucks and install it for a grand or two or less. It is the cost of driving a car. That being said, you are not driving a Yugo – Civics are one of the more reliable cars out there.
[quote=”KnowNothing” post=138732]I don’t get it though, aren’t all engines producing metallic debris? I did an oil analysis on the oil change before that and it was reporting that I had slightly higher iron in my oil than other people with the same engine. That filter wasn’t torn in that case so the only iron I am aware of is on Civics the blocks are aluminum but the cylinders are sleeved in iron. Then this must have been the engine producing metallic debris from the piston rings scraping the walls of the cylinder (even with any oil film left on the cylinders).[/quote]
The iron debris that is you need lab analysis to find is far smaller than the metal pieces I’m talking about. You would call it more of an iron residue than debris even. It’s the kind of thing that if you were to collect it all and look at it with the naked eye would be like a dab of metallic paste. That, dispersed in a few quarts of oil is not any kind of a guaranteed failure. You also said you baby the engine. Not that that’s entirely good, you would be minimizing bearing load doing that. That means that there is more likely to always have an adequate oil cushion between bearing surfaces that would allow your microscopic iron particles to just float on through the gap.
I found this picture trying to find numbers to illustrate the space available for solids in the oil. I found a random Honda D series engine spec of 0.0015″, or 40 microns, of oil clearance in main and rod bearings. I was unable to find a definitive number on the size of normally present particles in used engine oil, but what I did find made 40 microns sound like a generous gap to pass through. The picture is oversimplified, but illustrates what I’m talking about pretty well.
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