Lawnmower Oil Filters Cut Open! WIX vs FRAM vs Jonh Deere!

hey guys welcome back today I’ll be cutting up some oil filters for a lot more engines to see what kind of differences there are between some of the different brands I’ve got three samples here from wicks Fram and John Deere all of which cross-reference to the same engine so this is an apples-to-apples kind of comparison now whenever I do one of these videos I first like to gather as many of the specs as I can from each manufacturer
particularly with regard to the filter media type and efficiency and other things that are hard to measure directly wicks for example publishes a whole bunch of information more than most people probably care to know actually Fram does not disclose quite as much but they’re not bad john deere though hardly tells you anything after a good deal searching online all I could really find was a part number and price which was pretty frustrating to me
thankfully though if you look at the Fram and John Deere side-by-side you’ll quickly see that aside from color and stickers they’re identical and that is not the first time I’ve seen identical filters from different manufacturers save for the actual filter cartridge on the inside so we’ll we’ll just have to see about that when I get these cut up the wicks though is different it’s a little bit smaller in both height and diameter it’s also a little
bit lighter because of that and if you look from underneath you can definitely see that the tapping plate design and the gaskets are different the gaskets on all three of these are of rectangular cross-section though the wix’s is about all is only about 150,000 snick versus 180 or 185 on these other two furthermore the inlet hole pattern on the wicks is has a larger combined area at about 0.5 square inches versus around 0.36 on the other two now
that’s an interesting fact maybe more than a relevant one because your bottleneck to flow will be at your center hole or the filter cartridges anyway but it’s just something I took the time to measure just because now last thing I want to talk about before I cut these open is that if you look through the center holes I am used to looking at automotive oil filters where you can see a where you’re basically looking directly at the emergency bypass
valve which opens when the filter becomes clogged to let to basically keep your engine from starving for oil so I’m not seeing that when I look in these guys so either they don’t exist on these lawnmower filters or they’re kind of designed like the Napa filters are where the entire cartridge can move up and down relative to the base plate when flow is restricted beyond a certain point so I’m curious to see about that so I’m gonna go ahead and cut
these open right now so we can look at that and then get to the most important part which is the filter cartridge itself so here they are now the first thing I have to say before I get into further detail is that after looking at the internals of the Fram and the John Deere I’ve concluded that other than color and markings these are fully identical even down to the cartridge so for simplicity’s sake I mainly gonna focus on the Fram and the wicks
starting with the cases I measured them each to be about 15,000 stick here on the case wall and which is pretty typical for even automotive filters though I have come across some that are 20,000 thick just for higher burst pressure as far as material goes Fram says that their element is made of cellulose and glass a cellulose and glass blend well wicks says that theirs is enhanced cellulose bottom line is that these are both based on a wood pulp
which is not as high-performing as synthetic media but it is more economical I threw some calipers on each of these to measure the thickness of the paper and they were about the same measuring from 20,000 s if I really clamped on them to about 35 in the Free State in either case they’re about the same next we have efficiency frames website claims that they have a 95 percent efficiency for capturing particles greater than 20 microns well wixoss
theirs is 50 percent efficient at 20 microns but 95 at 41 microns I do want to caution you that these efficiency numbers may not always be apples to apples some companies like Fram advertise that they employ industry standards there were industry standardized tests when figuring this out but others are not always clear on this I emailed Wix to see what they had to say about it and the answer was a little bit vague but I want to say that they’re
using the same test that Fram is but just bear in mind that it’s not always clear and in either case they’re not you can’t they’re only there’s only so much that you can tell from a single efficiency number there are things that you just won’t know for example how much total dirt can the filter hold how quickly does it clog over time it may very well be that a more efficient filter will clog up faster because it’s filtering out more contaminants
so just be aware now for the dimensions I took a bunch of measurements on these to try to determine the total filter area for these I came up with an approximate 66 square inches for the Fram and 68 for the wicks so more or less the same and finishing up with the center tubes fram fram uses the more traditional single axial fold kind of down down one side whereas Wix uses the more complicated but stronger helical design here as you can see and
lastly let’s take a look at the bypass valve both filters use designs that are very different from each other but also different from anything else I’ve ever come across when I looked at automotive filters so this is pretty interesting the Fram uses a sprung sheet metal plate that lifts off of the top of the cover to let oil flow in through these holes and back down into your engine so that’s that’s pretty interesting but the one that’s really
cool is the wicks they were clever and integrated their emergency bypass valve here which is made from this lip on the top into their anti drain back valve piece now what that does is if you take the bottom of your cartridge and it’s in if you slip it over the top you get this little seal here on the inside now when the oil pressure becomes too great oil is able to flow right from the outside straight in through that seal and right back down the
center hole to your engine now the cool thing about that is not only is the design pretty straightforward and simple but in when the emergency bypass cell is functioning oil doesn’t really wash over the dirty cartridge on its way back in to the center to go back to your engine this thing bypasses all that and just goes straight back so it may be it’s a little bit cleaner but who knows for sure so that’s pretty much it for this quick overview of
some of the interesting things you’ll find in different lawnmower engine filters if you have any questions please leave a comment and don’t forget to subscribe and thank you for watching