CUTTING MORE OIL FILTERS - Case/New Holland VS. STP

Messicks here today with another filter cutting video. Today, we're going to go through our third filter cutting that we've done using a new Holland oil filter. This would be the most common oil filter in the new Holland system. Then we're intentionally choosing a really inexpensive filter to compare it to this time. The other videos that I've done, we've used some pretty mainline common filters. This is a whopping $5 filter from STP, so today we're going to go along here, cut these things open and see what the inside of a $5 filter looks like.

I've always prefaced every one of our filter videos here by saying that it's not my goal to sit here and tell you that in every circumstance you should always be running OEM stuff, no matter what all the time. I'm very quick to point out that I own a Ford vehicle and I don't have a Ford oil filter on it.

If I come away with any takeaways from these things, from the videos that I've done about oils and filters and that stuff, but come away with any like high-level comment, it's that a lot of times if you're not buying OEM stuff, you don't know what you're buying. Okay. There's a real complete lack of clear specification around filters and oils and that stuff that can make it really difficult to know if something that you're cross-referencing over to is really a quality product or not. That is one reason that you will always see us come around to recommending that you run OEM. That's always the resolution we're going to give you here.

When you look here at the base of the filter, you'll notice there are some pretty clear differences in the mating surface to your engine. You can see inside the STP filter, there's a lot of additional holes and layers and stuff going on there that I'm sure are going to be revealed when you really cut these things open.

The gaskets themselves are basically exactly the same size. The new Holland one is wider and thicker, and it's going to have a larger mating surface on your tractor than what the STP one is. The material of the gaskets themselves feel very much the same. The position of the threads in relationship to the gaskets are different. It looks like the new Holland one actually sits a little bit lower down in the floater canister. It'd be curious exactly how that looks when you go to thread it onto the engine and it makes a difference in say like the contact surface with the threads on the engine.

Just picking this can up here, I can immediately tell just like the Napa AK Wix filters that we have done here earlier. The cans themselves are always a lot lighter on these aftermarket filters than they are on every OEM filter that I've ever picked up before. The filter cutter here can actually take some time to pop open the OEM cans because the thickness of the metal itself is actually quite a bit different but that guy right there in just about two and a half passes around and it pops right open.

You'll often hear people pointing out that company XYZ doesn't manufacture filters, right? They're buying them from someone else. That is absolutely true. Quite obviously. You're not going to find like oil derricks in the Gulf with tractor companies, names on them, or them operating filter plants but in the case of this stuff here, these are fleetguard filters. We could tell you that for sure. They come from Cummins filtration.

Cummins filtration is definitely on the high end of your filter manufacturers. They make a good quality product and that's something we'll often come back around on this thing. When you are spending less money for a filter in whatever fashion you are getting less filter. It's not that you're just avoiding some mythical brand tax, right? The tractor companies, whoever they're are aware that these are competitive items that guys shop around for.

This isn't something that you're going to see huge markups on, right? They're very aggressively priced in order to be competitive in the marketplace. If you're paying less money for a filter, it's usually because you're getting less filter. Look at the backside of the top caps here. I'd be curious, somebody in the fluid analysis could probably tell you a lot better than I can, but looking at the holes and the layering here in the STP versus what's on the new Holland filter, there would definitely be some significant differences here in this filter's ability to flow. There's a lot more pathways and just not clear cut straight through holes like they're on here, honestly for a $5 filter. This is there's a lot more steel here than what I was expecting, even compared to some of the Napa filters that we did earlier, this is pretty heavy duty looking, frankly.

It's inside the cans here is where we always really start to see some of the real differences pop out and there's quite a few of them here. Looking at the rubber here, these seals on the top, the purpose of these seals is to keep-- They're called anti-drain back seals- is to keep things from running oil to running the wrong direction through the filters. The anti-drain back on this is a lot thinner, a lot less heavy-duty and allows us large as well on the STP compared to the CNH filter. When we pull the filtering elements themselves out again, frankly, this looks better than I expected for five bucks, but you'll notice here. This is a synthetic filter material. That is a lot denser. There's more paper material in here.

If you look at the thickness of the paper down here at the bottom, this is a very, very thin weave. This filter is probably only about a half an inch deep compared to quite a bit more here on the new Holland filter so there are just a lot more filtering capacity and a more expensive filter than there isn't a cheaper one. That is something we will say, if you do choose to run these for convenience purposes, you should be changing them more often because there's not as much material in here to capture contaminants as there are in a better quality filter.

Every filter is going to have some relief mechanism in the bottom of it. The thinking being that it's better than for some oil to be able to flow through the filter than none at all, so if it starts to plug up or not flow properly, for some reason, there's a bypass in place. In the case of this one, the bypass is this piece of metal down here on the bottom. I had some other filters that I cut apart earlier that used this same thin metal but on those filters, that piece of metal was a spring. It was spring steel that would push back up into place. This doesn't spring at all, so if you had a filter bypassing, basically pushing down on top of here, this piece of metal is going to pound flat and once it pounds flat, the filter here is never going to seal back up against the threads and it will forever at that point, then be bypassing and not doing anything to filter your engine oil at all.

This new Holland filter though is quite a bit different. There's this really heavy-duty piece of spring steel down here on the bottom that's in place in order to hold the filter up against the bottom of the threads. It has a completely separate relief mechanism built into it, which is really interesting. This isn't something that I've seen on the other filters that we've cut to this point. You see here in the middle, there's this little red circle. This actually is a spring-loaded relief valve that can push up into the base of the filter.

I'm sure there's a good engineering reason behind this, right? Maybe tuning it for a specific pressure. I don't know. If you have specific knowledge about this, I'd be really interested to hear in the comments because it's the first that I've seen built like this.

Looking at the cans of the filters themselves, like I said, when I cut these things open, the OEM filters are always significantly heavier cans than what you will find on these cheapy aftermarkets and that's obvious to me sitting there holding them. I can feel that there's just more mass, there's more weight and meat in this can than there are, is in the blue one here.

The important thing for crush resistance, so when oil is being forced through these things, sometimes if there's a vacuum drawing on it, you'll see the cans crushed or something that happens to pop it up and puncture them. A lot of guys that run their tractors in wooded areas and that kind of things, you could see [unintelligible 00:07:51] banging against these things and this is going to take a lot more of a hit, especially with the beveled bottom and stuff on it here, the curve round bottom than this is going to.

If I pull my calipers out here, I can actually put a number to that. If we grab the lip of the new Holland can here, you'll see that this is right about one millimeter, maybe nine-tenths of a millimeter thick. If I do it with my STP can here, this comes in at right about a half, half to six-tenths. Just about half the thickness of what the real tractor filter is.

The integrity of the filter inside of the can is pretty important. If anything starts to fall apart in here, it'll cause the filter to plug up and not flow properly. When we get to some of these really inexpensive filters, you'll start to see some really shoddy construction. This one uses this white piece of foam here around the bottom as a bottom seal to help hold the pleating together. You'll notice though that this uses a much heavier duty metal cap, significant metal cap in order to keep the construction together.

Even seen some of these before, where you'll almost see paper or cardboard down here around the bottom, it's just not real heavy duty. The inside of the filter material here to hold this together is a plastic, wide plastic mesh, where this filter is going to use a much heavier duty metal construction.

Again, when we just started looking at weight and mass and build quality, a completely different world right here than what you have on our cheap economy filter. In conclusion, you can see you get what you pay for this stuff, right? A cheap filter is simply less product than what you get in a heavier-duty-- Thought it'd cost more money, right? Guys always have negative reactions to being told to buy OEM, right?

Oftentimes, there's that perception that you're being taken advantage of, that you're paying more money for things unnecessarily but unfortunately, when you get into this stuff, it's just really hard to know what you're buying, if you're not buying OEM. The OEM vendor is really the only company in the supply chain that cares about about the health of your equipment. They matter. If that engine blows up and their filter is on it and it's their engine, there's nobody else to point fingers at, there's nowhere else to go for problems to be laid upon.

Conversely, though, if you're running somebody else's filter, you'll hear big claims from these companies that they'll stand behind failures, I'm here to tell you they don't. We see regular failures in our shop from aftermarket filters, happens every year several times and I have yet to hear somebody actually standing behind it paying for repair, it just simply doesn't happen.

Going through improving these kinds of failures is phenomenally difficult and phenomenally expensive. It just doesn't happen. We come back around without clear specification, without really knowing what's inside one of these cans, even if it's a high-end part. You just don't know what you're getting. That said, for five bucks, not too bad. I did a NAPA Silver, Gold and Platinum earlier and frankly, I think this is even a little bit better step-up from the entry-level NAPA filter for $5. That's my read. Go back and watch this other video, see if you think any different about it.

If you'd like to see other filters along these lines, this is the last filter that I had sitting on the shelf in order to do this with. Let us have some comments down below, let us know what you'd like us to cut apart, what things might be valuable for you to know when it comes to these maintenance items for your tractors and equipment.
If you need parts for machines that you already have, if you're looking to buy a piece of equipment or you have something that needs some repair work done to it, give us a call at Messicks, we're available at 800.222.3373 or online at messicks.com