Did you know if you wait too long to change your motor oil filter your filter can become so full of dirt and debris that a bypass valve will open? And you guessed it, if the bypass valve opens you are pumping dirty oil straight into the engine.
This is why changing your oil and filter on a regular interval is a good thing because it insures your oil filter never gets to the point of opening its bypass valve and allowing unfiltered oil into the engine on a continuous basis.
To better understand the harm this can do I will explain the basic function of the oil system.
Oil in your engine is sucked up by the oil pump, pushed through the filter, then ported to various areas of the engine to lubricate and cool. Many of the bearings have oil ported into them. This is one of the areas that is of great concern should your oil filter go to bypass and here’s why.
Plain journal bearings rely completely on a thin film of oil to keep the two sides of the bearing seperated. Oil films are generally on the order of thickness of 1 -2 thousandths of an inch. Just for reference a human hair is 4 thousandths of an inch thick so the oil film is half to a quarter the thickness of a human hair.
This thin film of oil needs to be clean. As you can imagine any small particulate debris like a grain of sand can cause the oil film gap to be bridged. What this does is eat out the babbitt of the bearing and reduces the effective area of the bearing. The bearing is less capable of handling heavy loads like when you are accelerating. If it gets too bad the bearing will quickly wear out and you will have definitive engine problems.
So if your oil filter is blocked and its bypass valve is open then any dirt in the oil that was entrained through the air intake system can now pump directly into the tiny clearances of your bearings and cause immediate damage. It doesn’t take long for a plugged or damaged oil filter to cause irreversible harm to the critical surfaces in your engine. Loss in performance will show up in reduced horsepower and poor gas mileage.
An oil filter is critical to the life of your engine along with the proper selection of synthetic motor oil. If you would like to discover which oil is right for you then grab your free report at best motor oil review.
