Frantz toilet paper oil filter... anybody use them?

If you go to an older parts store, they can get you a filter(non TP type) that will drop right in those housings. I brought my Frantz filter in as a joke, the guy went in the back room and came out with the replacement FRAM filter element.

Karl

 

I have one of these, sold as a water seperator for spray painting. I use it in my air line just before the hose to my spray gun. I pop in a new roll of TP before each spray job and the old one is damp with water when I remove it. Bought it in the 1980's. Works great in my application.

 

Here's mine, I got it at a swap last summer. I'm saving it for my 32 project. They are supposed to work great, but the most important thing to remember: NEW toilet paper ONLY. Dingleberries can cause major engine damage!

 

Cool! I found a Stilko way back and haven't used it yet.. The funny thing is you need to use a half used roll. How's that work

 

I remember these things were going to be a big deal in the early sixties. They were actually paying guys with big rigs to run the stuff. I didn't think it ever actually took off. Nobody around here runs'em that I know of.

J

 

I have a couple of these sitting around. One is brand new never installed and one was hooked up at one time but is complete. Look just like the one posted by Mike Zenor....Pm if interested.... EVILT

 

I never used them, but I knew an old guy that had one on his '59 Rambler. He swore he had it put on when he bought the car new and had never cxhanged the oil. Just change the TP when suggested by the manufaturer, and the regular filter every 6K miles. Of course, he said the TP replacement nesessitated adding 2-3 qts every 500 miles, then the one qt for the regular filter, he was probably changing his oil more often that anyone else in town. This was in '70-71 and his car never used oil, never rattled the slightest, and when he died in '85, they sold it in his estate auction, still a sweet running little car with over 200K on the engine and no work ever done to it. The yr before he died, he took it many times from N.M./Tex border to Cal. with little or no preperation. I'm not endorsing their use, just recounting the facts, only the facts, ma'am.

Course this is just as I remember it, I could be wrong

Jerry

 

They seem to work OK as long as NO water contaminates the oil. If h2o is presant in the oil (condensation, blown head gasket, whatever) the the TP will do what it's supposed to do, break apart so it will decompose. problem is, your engine will decompose when all the oil gallies clog.

 

I ran on on my old Scout. you do have to change your oil I changed mine every 4000 miles. The advantage is that Shit paper is cheap I used to carry a 4 pack of single ply in the back and when the odometer hit the 500 mile mark I took and pulled over and just changed the filter then added a quart of oil and kept running I guess it hurt the engine I put over 200,000 miles on it before the body got so bad I couldnt drive it any more.
The only down side it made it a bit messy to wipe your ass.

Dawg

 

I did some PR/ad work for Stilko and the hot deal was getting one of the TP makers to make partial rolls. Pep Boys handled them in SoCal. A lot of them were unsold and recycled by the manufacturer. I suspect that somebody could get semi-rich today with 30 minute informationals on the Speed Channel!

 

I used them back in the late 50's and early 60's, but not since. Thye worked good, but are a real mess to change out.

 

I may put one of these on my car and drive the crap out of it!

 

What if you run Synthetic Oil? They claim you can go 10,000 miles with only a filter change because it does not break down, nor build up acids????

 

There's a Frantz filter on the truck I dragged home last weekend. No clue if the thing works, but the oil is clean.

 

In the 80s we had a contractor where I worked in a chemical plant who would do work for us periodically. He drove a Ford pickup with the TP filter rig on it. With 180,000 miles on it he showed us his dipstick and the oil had absolutely no discoloration. He swore by it but I have always been skeptical.

Toilet paper is made by chemically dissolving wood into small fibers. Once the slurry has had the caustic soda removed it is pumped into a large tank called a "diffused air flotation tank" in which high pressure air is difused into the bottom of the tank in tiny outlets much like the bubbles that rise in beer or carbonated soft drinks. The tiny bubbles attach to the wood fiber and float them to the surface where they are extracted into a roller to remove all remaining water. NOTHING binds the fibers together!!! It has to be that way. Public waste treatment systems would have a nightmare if all toilet paper was bound up by resins such as that used in wet-strength hand towels.

It seems to me that as another HAMBer said above that fiber would inevitably end up clogging oil passages unless it acts as a pre-filter in front of the regular filter. Even then it would seem that all that fiber would soon blind the existing oil filter and cause loss of oil pressure.

 

I have one of those on my air line when I spray paint. Traps water great, just change the roll every time I paint.

 

Years ago I was told a story by an oldtimer (might be B.S.) that he removed a valve cover on a car with a T.P. filter and under it was another valve cover made out of broken down T.P. Sounds like it could happen but now that I think about it he was usually full of crap. I should hang with people my age.

 

Looks like you can still order them along with "replacement filters" on their website.
http://www.frantzoil.com/page/page/4746217.htm

When I first got my 54 it had one of those filters on. The filter in the parts catalog looked too big so my boss(old car dude) came to take a look at it and immediatly knew what it was. I am not running it but have it stashed away somewhere.
Cesar

 

I ran one of those toilet paper filters on a dune bugy we raced in the sand in about 1970. VW motors then didn't have oil filters.It worked great. No motor problems. Considering the dusty enviorment they were spectacular. The one we ran was just like the ones in the pictures, You would unscrew the large nut on the top of the canister and it would come apart in the centre,pull the dirty oil soked roll of toilet paper out,trash it, (we didn't worry about the enviorment back then) put a new roll in ,put the canister top back on, and you were good to go. I did see a simmular unit lately at an auto body supply place. It was intended to be used as a water filter for a large air compressor system for a body shop. It was the identical looking to the oil filter I used 38 years ago

 

sounds Like A Bunch Of "crap" To Me!

 

Still using my Stilko with TP on my 50 Plymouth. ~3 years now and no problems, but I do (infrequently)change my oil just like with a regular filter.

 

i work in a body shop and we use a filter similar to these, (for an air filter for the air coming from the air compressor)
the air compressor is on the outside of the building, and in the summer time the tank sweats and puts a lot of water through the paint gun
weve tried several types of filters, some worked pretty good
but we havent had any trouble with water shooting through the paint gun since weve installed the tp filter, just change the tp every now and then

 

My dad, who had been a traveling salesman all of his life selling fuel and supplies for Municipal Generating plants (anyone remember them? in the midwest, just about every small town had it's own electrical generating plant in the first half of the century), repped for Frantz after he retired. The thing I remember about them is that they came with a sticker, about the size of the old oil change stickers that they used to put on the door jambs, except it was made of blotter paper. You were supposed to take out your dipstick every 100 miles after you installled the filter and touch it to the blotter sticker. After you had done this (I think 5 times), and the oil "dried", you could actually see it get cleaner and cleaner, so that part of it actually worked. We had them on all of our cars, my dad's '58Olds Super 88, my mother's '58 Nomad, and my 1951 Ford. As others have said, we considered this a "belt and suspenders" approach, and still followed the recommended oil and filter change intervals. They really did clean up the oil.

By the way, I seem to remember that back in those days, the regular procedure was to change the filter only every fourth or fifth oil change. Anyone else remember it this way?

 

I guess I saw my first Frantz filter in about 1957. My understanding is they have been around since the 30's. I purchased my first one in 1976. I never change my oil. For those of you that know, oil does not wear out, contaminates sludge it up. Oil in itself, does not break down, contaminates break it down. If you can keep your oil clean it will last forever. That is "FOREVER." Some diesel engine owner operators never change their oil; some diesel owner operators never shut their engines down for 10 - 20 - 30 years. That is because there is no reason, their oil is continually being filtered centifugally and all contaminates are discharged. As with changing toilet paper rolls, all contaminates, to include: acid which ataches to small carbon particles, you've got them floating in your oil, and you throw them out with the old oil. I throw them, carbon particles with attached acids out with the paper. Ledt's get to the person who says that toilet paper plugs all the orfices in the engine. I think they've plugged his orfices, but not in his engine. In the first place oiled paper (compressed does/cannot breakdown. And if it did, how would it get past the double screen in the bottom of the Frantz, then go thru the 1/4" line to the pan thru the oil pickup screen, through "His" oil filter, through the crank, cam, etc bearing journals with .003" clearance to get into the rest of "His" engine. In my several hundred thousand miles of Frantz filter use I've never encountered water in the oil, but if it went through the frantz, it would be drinkable. The finest filter in a gas turbine engine is the fuel filter at 5.0 microns, the frantz filters, through toilet paper 50 times finer to .5 microns. Frantz has all the data to back it up ... about 70 years worth of scientific data. I use the Frantz toilet paper for the past several years, I think I started back around 82 because, like one man said, the paper roll quality is not as good as it was and it separates, but moreover, the cheap cardboard centers crush and the oil bypasses. So for a $2.00 roll of paper every 3 months, and not having to buy, dispose, change, have changed, oil, my oil is always as clear as maple syrup. I used Castrol GTX for several years but have been using synthetic for several years now. Y'all do yourselves a service and google Frantz Oil Filters, or just go to http://[URL="http://www.WeFilterIt.com"]www.WeFilterIt.com[/URL] for the truth and no BS like I've read here tonight. Go to www.lincolnsonline.com, and click TECH, then Click Oil and learn something. StreetrodderMag's, Ron Cerdono has done two great articles on oil this year also, but some of you haven't read those either. A regular engine filter, "filters" about probably 700 to 12, 1400 qts per hour, and a Frantz probably 50 to 150 at a partial flow. Ya know, if most folks would change their oil and filter every 2500 to 4000 miles, there wouldn't be any leaking front and rear seals......Okay, you tell me why...

 

I got one of those Frantz remote bypass filter setups as an addition to my modern spin-on full flow filter for my 261.
The combination of both filter types gets rid of 20 micron and larger particles right after the oil pump and the Frantz filter removes all remaining particles down to 1/10th of a micron.

I ended up just with the full-flow type, since I didn't want to drill a return passage into the block or oil pan of my brand new engine.
Instead I will get rid of the remote canister type of my 235 and go with the Frantz, since the passages are already there.


One could just have the oil lab-tested after replacing a roll of TP.
I have a feeling the folks at Frantz did more than a simple analysis over the decades of selling their product and know what they are doing. They claim the TP removes water from the oil, which makes sense and is a good thing. The TP is long replaced, before it can start to break down.
There are some companies that do have good products and are doing the right thing.

I would still keep regular oil change intervals with full-flow, bypass or both systems combined.
Fresh oil is a good thing and I always enjoy changing it, as I know how much my motors like it.

 

i put one on my 69 camaro in 1971 , mine used an adel type clamp around the bottom plate and had a double screen .changed it about every month or so and added a quart of new oil with the new roll of striking paper , didn`t trust it enuff to not change the factory filter pretty regularly had 148,000 miles on it when i sold it .never saw any sign of paper in the valve covers.it was put on just for shits and giggles had plenty of money to waste back then.but i`d say they did a good job

 

As an active Frantz Oil Filter Authorized Distributor, I am happy to explain the facts, truths, and misnomers about the product I have been associated with since 1960. I have one on my two "daily drivers" and my Kubota diesel tractor. I have not changed my oil in my 98 Montaro Sport since 2003 (5 years) and don't recall when I ever changed it on my Samurai. I can show you a photo of my dipstick but would prefer to show you in person.
I don't recommend using toilet paper. I have not found a toilet paper brand that has the correct inner cardboard tube sized correctly which is one of the most important areas of concern. When the Frantz brand is only $1.75 why experiment and then blame your failureit on the filter? I try to explain all the FAQ on my website frantzoil.com for those interested. Happy motoring.

 

There was and older guy selling them... I think his name was Mr. Whipple.

 

I bought a 1976 3/4 ton that had a Franz on the engine and one on the cooler line of the transmission from the day it was purchased. I had to pull the engine because of a cracked block ( that was why it was being sold ). When I pulled the engine apart, it was very clean inside.and there was no corrosion. I have the filters on the wall of my garage.
I always had my oil analyzed when I used a bypass filter on my diesel engines, and in one example, I went 60,000 miles before changing the oil in a diesel truck, I only changed the filters when the analysis showed that the contaminants were increasing. This was with an Amsoil bypass filter and synthetic oil. This is a different and much more efficient design than the Franz, but it does prove that you can use bypass filtering for extended changes without building acid in the engine. The rational was that the oil a person added when they changed the filter would supply sufficient anti corrosion protection.
It worked well in all the engines that I saw ( I sell them ) that used bypass in addition to the filtering. Bypass filters are something I would consider for fleet use, but not for a daily driver that only goes 5000 to 7000 miles a year.
Bob

 

This is an interesting, and timely, post. I'm getting ready to install a bypass filter on the '60 235 I plan to run in my '52 Chevy. I was originally going to go full flow and convert to a spin on filter, but I'm trying to keep the modernization a little more stealthy. I like the look of the bypass filter hanging off of the intake; it seems more "mechanical" or something. A spin on full flow filter only filters down to about 15-30 microns, and when the oil's cold it misses the filter altogether (through the bypass valve inside the filter). I did a lot of research online and most bypass filter systems will filter down to 1 micron, if not more. Your oil turns black because of the carbon it picks up from the combustion process; when you change your oil, all of that junk gets thrown away. A bypass filter can remove all of that carbon- that's why the oil looks clean after extended use.

Some have said that, even though the oil looks clean it turns acidic, causing more damage than particles would. This is true, but acid is a product of the combination of water vapor and combustion gases- remove the water and acidity is nearly eliminated. The Frantz filter itself can remove up to 6 oz of water from the oil, trapping it in the filter where it gets thrown away at filter change. In addition, a good PCV system will help vent combustion gases from the crankcase, also prohibiting the formation of acid. As to the T.P. breaking down in the presence of water, I don't think there's enough there to really cause the paper to come apart, and T.P. doesn't dissolve in oil.

When you change your filter, you do throw away a bit of oil, and you'll need to top it off. When you add a quart of oil, you're also replenishing the additive package that has broken down over time. Since you're supposed to change filters every 2000 miles, depending on your driving habits you could, in effect, completely replace your oil in a year's time.