Quote:
Originally Posted by darkdan
Well 60% of engine wear is caused by particles in the 5 micron to 25 micron range.
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Obviously any dirt that gets into your engine is bad. All filters allow some dirt through. I'm simply saying that the amount of difference between a K&N and a paper filter may not be enough to make a real world difference in the life of an engine. Particularly since some of the cheap paper filters people use are pretty poor.
By the way, that article specifically says that they used "coarse" dust for the testing. "Fine" dust was used in a couple tests on the K&N, but none of the others. Since you say that 60% of engine wear comes form 5-25 micron particles I would be interested to see how the paper filters do on those. Not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious. The article even says that manufacturers use "coarse" dust so their filtering percentages appear higher. That leads me to believe that they don't fare as well against fine dust. In the few tests done with "fine" dust on the K&N it performed worse than with coarse, so it would be interesting to see how paper filters fare against fine dust.
For the record, I don't have a K&N in my car and like I said, all dirt is bad and the amount of flow difference probably isn't worth the risk. I was just pointing out that the chances of noticeably reducing engine life by installing a K&N are pretty small.