I get in the car and go to both megastores and I look high and low for something to put into that steel frame to turn it into a high performance low resistance air filter.  I look in the house air filter stuff.  I look in the lawnmower parts stuff.  I look in the pool filter stuff.  I look in the humidifier stuff.   I look everywhere, but nothing will make that steel frame into a high performance low air resistance cleanable air filter.  

Ol Yoda's really gonna kick my butt -- and the people at these stores are all idiots even when you can find one to ask them a question.  Heck, they even send me off to the window air conditioner area to look at the flimsy little air filters that go on those pitiful things.  Useless -- it's nothing but a see through it skinny-thin piece of polyester cloth anyway.

===========================

On the way back to the swamp to get my butt kicked, I cast my eyes over along the strip malls and I notice that the Hobby Lobby is open on the 4th of July
(strange, I didn't know them old knit-witches were open on holidays)

I stop and go in -- I mean, what have I got to lose?   I'm in such a big hurry to get back to the swamp and get my butt kicked?

I go up and show the empty frame and screen to the knit-witch on duty and she smiles a toothless smile at me and says

"Come with me, sweetie....  hee hee __ we'll fix that ol Yoda for you"

and she grabs up her cane and hobbles off into the tall stacks of crap that are everywhere in that store.   We go past the fake flowers and past the wreaths.  We trudge past the nicknacks.  We go all the way back to the quilting section and I know the old bat is really off her rocker when she tells me to pull down this big square chunk of white crap from off the top shelf.

"Dearie, you just got to understand a few things about how things really work.  K&N started out as a thin layer of cotton batting trapped between two pieces of screening with a little canola oil sprayed on it with a few drops of red food dye in the canola oil to make it look all "expensive" so the suckers would buy it.   That's all it was originally, simple thin cotton cloth.  If you didn't oil it, it would rot out on you after a few years.  Modern spun bound polyester fabric is more durable and much better rot-wise, so we'll use that for our filter element.



Now what you do is take this nice 1" thick inter-linked fine spun polyester batting and cut it into a nice 5 1/2" square then you just tuck it into that steel frame you got in your hand and then you spray a little canola oil on it (Pam will work just fine if that's all you've got, dearie) after you get it tucked in place good.  And sweetie, remember to leave off that outside door from your air box and to rip out that ugly rubber snorkel thingy too so your engine can breathe all better for you.  

(continued)

Poly-fil Nu-Foam is what the stuff is called.  It is a newly developed fine spun fiber thickly populated polyester batting that is really thick, up to 4" thick, that is intended to replace expanded cell foam in places you don't want mildew and rot to take place.  Plus, it can't smother your newborn baby with his bedding because he can breathe right through it
(real popular stuff with the mommie types on the baby isle).

http://www.poly-fil.com/nufoam.asp

This stuff is available at anyplace that sells women's hobby supplies for obvious reasons.  If not, type nu-foam into your browser and the net will sell it to you.

If you have any issues getting the batting to stay in your frame (you didn't cut it big enough for example) you can recover by using a needle and thread to lightly go through the batting, through the screening and back up again.  Big loose stitches are what is needed.  Don't pull anything tight as that will screw up your loft (height) which is important to your filter's ability to pass lots of air.

I spray my nu-foam with Mazola PURE canola oil (little yellow spray can) because it is thick and clingy and it does not have flour or other solids in it.  I also use the stuff to lube my shredder cross-cut head by spraying it on a piece of paper then shredding the paper.

As far as the Star Wars story line goes, it makes it more fun to read -- techie how to do it stuff can get deadly boring to read otherwise.  Ain't much fun to write, either.

And if you think the story was funny, you shoulda seen the looks I got from the real knit-witches at the artsy-craftsy store for picking up various pieces of their stuff and breathing and blowing noisily through them .... they musta thought I had me a stopped up nose or something.

=============================

Warning:  For you modern bike style guys with catalytic converters and computer driven oxygen sensors on your scoots -- oil sprayed on air filters can kill several hundred dollars worth of your sensors.  It's the oil that gets in the air stream that does the evil deed to your very sensitive sensor heads.  Our Savages don't have any of such like techie stuff, being understandable type carburetor-based old style scoots.  

<grin>

Oldfeller

One year follow up on the base idea, with six months since last opened up and looked at.  This is the thicker 2" polyester "Newfoam" batting material sewn down into the gutted stock airframe using black thread so you can see the sewing pattern.  Batting was collapsed by the sewing from 2" to 1 1/2" and it looks like it settled another quarter inch or thereabouts due to air suction going through it (leaf blower effect).

Intent to this generation of trick was to come up with a Gunk engine cleaner washable (in the kitchen sink no less) very durable re-oilable air cleaner that has the characteristic high air flow & low air resistance of a high performance air filter while combining a very low initial cost, better than stock air particle filteration and a robust reliable/durable nature in the face of motor blowby fumes, sand, dust, etc.

This is the third evolvement of this cheapie filter idea and I do believe it is getting close to meeting all its goals.

This filter element has been in place for a solid six months run, so it has had time to get all dirty and gritty.  Let's see what we got here.



Well, we've got a hell of a dirty mess -- my home town has lots of sand and dirt in the air and we've had a plenty of land clearing, road and other forms of bulldozer work to kick up plenty of dust and dirt that I had to dive through.  

Note the free oil from the motor puke tube that has accumulated down inside the airbox -- this was about a half ounce of oil that I let out of the little stoppered drain tube after I took this picture.  You need to remember to unstopper and drain this tube every time you drain your oil, BTW.


First question:  Does Mazola spray oil (Pam like stuff) evaporate out to be all sticky and gummy-like and does it catch sand and grit and dust and HOLD on to it like nobody's business?



Yes, it is yellow, sticky and holds on to what hits it.  These are full size grains of sand sticking to a smooth plastic surface because the oil won't let go once it gets hold of something.  

The yellow spray on Mazola fry pan anti-stick oil seems to work as a filter conditioner oil just dandy, thank you very much.  Does it really stick around on the polyester filter fibers though?




The oil is yellow and you can see it "sticking around" very clearly on both the top and bottom views, so I would say it does stick around and continue to do its job even after 6 months of sucking air through it.


Now, final and most important question:  Did anything (no matter how fine) get past and through the filter batting & Mazola oil combination?



These top and bottom images are HUGE images that you can only see a corner of it here on the list without scrolling the scroll bar at the very bottom of the whole thread.  

To answer this question completely for yourself, right click on the image, "save the image as" and save the full size picture over to your desktop then blow it up 800x with your favorite image editor and look 'till your hearts content.  You can do the same thing on the dirty side picture and like me you will conclude that air borne dirt doesn't even get very deep into the dirty side before running into a gummy oil coated strand and getting captured and held.  On the dirty side I can see down into the batting far enough to see clean white strands sitting there waiting for some dust to come see them.

Having torn apart the last one inch polyester batt version and finding that the finest dust didn't penetrate but a quarter of an inch, I think this slightly compressed 2" version has twice more fibers per inch and a good bit more depth in it to do an even more through job of stopping the finest dust and filth for an extended period.

Looks good to me, I put it right back into place UNTOUCHED to finish out a full year of use before looking at it again.  It didn't need washing yet.  I did not even add any more Mazola spray oil to it (it still had plenty of unused undirtied liquid yellow oil still trapped in the batting, easily visible from both sides of the batting)

Test continues .....    

Oldfeller

Diamond Jim reminded me my air filter was still there so I thought I would check on it and take some pictures.  Main question was "Had any fine stuff made it through the compressed 2" thick batting yet?".

First, some shots of the  filter dirty side with pushing 2 years worth of dirty stuff from the air flow impregnating it  Although the weave of the fabric is still open and passing air without impeding the flow you gotta admit, it sure is DIRTY on the dirty side.




Now that is pretty dirty looking stuff on the dirty side.   Surprising thing is that nothing much made it through to the back side of the filter.  The oil soaking everything has gotten a little dingy looking, which is clearly shown in this picture compared to a brand new filter element.  Careful examination with a magnifying glass showed no particulates, but the oil looked a little off color (remember, it was a clearish yellow to start with and it is now a dingy tannish color).




Did the yellow clear oil change color or is it starting to pick up supremely tiny fine particulates all the way to the back side of the filter finally?   I wiped the back screen of the filter with a clean white Kleenex tissue to see if anything was physically there on the back side of the filter.  

<note: this is a BLOW UP picture -- the scroll bar is at bottom of this post>




The oil is darker and isn't a nice yellow any more, but it still seems to be a clear oil and contains no discernible solid matter.  It penetrates the Kleenex and darkens it very slightly as seen in the picture.   Originally the yellow canola oil would yellow the Kleenex in a similar fashion, so I would say the oil has oxidized and changed color some from passing all that O2 laden air through it over the nearly 2 years it has been in service.

I put the clean side up and sprayed more yellow Mazola frying pan spray on the back side of the filter and let it soak into the mass of fabric, then I left it overnight so the volatile carrier could evaporate and turn the spray back into its sticky wonderfulness.   I did this rather than cleaning the filter mass and respraying it simply to see what would happen.  After all, it isn't like the fibers are blocked with dirt or anything.  They are simply dusty on one side and still clean on the other side.   The oil itself had oxidized some, but that just needed some reinforcement with some new oil, applied from the clean side and carried by gravity to re-wet the dirty side.




Back in she goes, after nearly 2 years of use it still hasn't allowed any appreciable numbers of particles of dust or dirt to penetrate the whole thickness of the filter.


Not to shabby for $4.00 ....  good filtration and excellent durability too.  

Plus it proves if you choose to you CAN refresh the sticky yellow oil from the back side without washing the filter -- the oil migrates through down through the filter mass and renews the trap oil on the front side without allowing the mess to move back upstream towards the back clean side.   You CAN oil up the dirty fabric strands -- the dirt already trapped on the strand gets turned into little filter "sub-fingers" to reach out and trap new particles even more effectively than the bare smooth fabric strand could do originally.

 
First post in this series was 2007 and it is now September 2015.  

8 years of testing, with three filter element changes (so I could delaminate them to see how far dirt got towards the inside) with this last element being in there for the last 5 years now.

What prompted this check was a Garmin led adventure on some black lines on this past Dragon trip that turned out to be mostly unpaved -- 30 miles of rough, bumpy dusty dirt roads and I was riding tail end charlie position with my engine eating all that cloud of red dust.  

It was so bad Moderator Dave was kissing the pavement when we finally found some, and I was repeatedly beating on my pants legs to try to get the solid red layer of fine dust off my clothes.   The bikes were a right mess, lemme tell ya.  

I thought then, hey, it's time to check that air filter element when I get back home.

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First pair of shots are how it looked "as removed" from the bike    There is considerable red/brown dust caked on the front of the oiled element and some signs of penetration into the filter mass.






Obviously nothing much is getting through the filter, so lets check on that theory by doing the air box contamination check.   This involves squares of toilet paper wiped on the pre-filter air box surfaces and another one wiped on the post filter air box surfaces.




OK, the square on the left is solid with red/brown dust and very very dark and gritty.   The one on the right shows the standard oil coloration and was very light and smooth and felt like oil.    (you need to slide the slider over at the bottom of the post to see the right hand toilet paper square)

The air box itself shows that nothing grit or red dust based is getting through the filter element.

As we all know, oil is present inside the air box because the huff tube dumps oil mist laden blow by into the air box itself and the oil mist winds up pooled in the bottom of the air box and all over the interior air box surfaces.  


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I plan to keep on using this same filter, but I need to augment the oil in it some.   I apply petroleum jelly to do this, on the upper quarter of the filter on the dirty side, forcing it into the matt some such that it will "open up" and pass some air.   This particular area is subjected to the air blast from the seat area and it is the first area to go dry.  Is is also the top of the matt as it sits in the air box, so gravity will move lube placed here downwards while the air motion through the filter moves it into the filter matt.   Lube this area good and you have lubed the whole filter (over enough time of course).

By using petroleum jelly to re-lube this area I give it a maximum sticky and maximum "stick around some" lube that is compatible with the base oil load in the filter proper.

On the clean side, I apply two through sprayings of CRC Belt Conditioner -- this goes on thin and clear,  "washes" the clean side all white and clean and then sets up into a very tacky, sticky, glue like film on all the washed fibers.   It is compatible with the oil used originally and "sticks around" wonderfully (which is exactly what it does on your "V" belts too, now isn't it?).  

The fine fiber dirt it washes free rejoins the oil pool on its slow slow trip to the huff tube pool -- so by "washing" the inside surface I essentially make the filter clean and new again, except where it is already perfectly justifiably "filthy dirty".   And I add greatly to the sticky factor while doing so.

It is my theory now that eventually all heavy oils (and yes, petroleum jelly is just a thicker than normal oil based product) will move down through the matt and drip down into the oil pool from the huff tube, carrying the trapped dust with it.

However, this system has proven it will remove fine fine dust without clogging up as the fine dust is caught by the oil and migrates down to the huff tube pool and gets drained by the drain tube at oil change time.

I have also now shown you a way to maintenance this filter system without taking it apart and replacing the element all the time.    

BTW, this "clean and re-lube without replacing" system appealed to ol' Master Yoda quite a bit, it did.   He actually returned my light saber to me again and he is actually giving me Force Lightning lessons now to show he thinks I am finally finally "getting it".

    .... that force lightning stuff stings a bit, ya know --- 'ol Yoda, he jest keeps on tossing it at me and I try to catch as much as I can of it ....  
..... but it stings, yes indeedy, it certainly does .....    yeeeeowie !!!

 ... hee hee .... stupid paduan, take that !!!!   Electro-stimulation opens  synapses,  help pitiful brain grow quicker, it will .....

I'm going to give this one a try. Matter of fact, I've already bought the foam, cut it to fit, and stitched it to the old air filter screen after cutting the paper away (tough stuff, that). I'll apply the spray a week or so before I put it in.

I'm not doing a muffler change right away, so I'm thinking I'll leave the door and snorkel in place for now, unless there's some benefit to removing them before the exhaust is less restricted?

Hi All from Yorkshire - re- keeping crud out of the motor - an old competition bike tip was to rub grease round the airbox - that catches a lot of muck for very little buck...