what follows is something of a shaggy dog story, a link to ebay, and a
question - with that warning, read or ignore as you see fit. The object in
question is made of steel, so the mandatory metal content is satisfied, and
I even had to use an extractor to remove a piece I broke, so there is some
minor metal working content too.

About 20 years ago (plus or minus a few), at a swap meet I bought an
external canister oil filter thinking I might use it on a 36 cadillac I had
started restoring (by the way, the car still isn't done - but that probably
doesn't surprise anyone - there's a photo or two on my web page,
wbnoble.com). The filter came in a burlap bag, and when I decided that it
wasn't sufficiently original for my tastes, I hung it from the rafters of my
garage and pretty much forgot about it. Yesterday I looked up and noticed
that the burlap was starting to tear, so I took it down, wiped the dust off
it and put it on ebay - if I haven't used it in 20 years, the theory goes,
then I probably don't need it - but in the process of making up the listing,
I did a bunch of searching, found a catalog that listed it (all these things
are in the auction, here
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=300226458615
and I read the catalog description. This is a very large filter, but they
say it is for cars (!) with a crank case capacity of up to 6 quarts - so
that would be typical of most cars up through the 70s - 5 quarts being a
pretty common capacity. The filter itself holds 3 quarts - and it's really
quite big - bigger even than the ones that used toilet paper as the filter
medium.

So my question is were these things REALLY used on cars or was this more for
a truck or tractor application - somehow I just can't imagine it on a
regular passanger car - maybe they were used on taxis? Anyone on this group
remember these things and their usage? It's not at all clear what makes
them so special, to me it looks just like a giant canister oil filter - am I
missing something?

--
Bill
www.wbnoble.com


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