Prompted by a discussion in the "OIL FILTERS: which one to buy????" thread, I have totally disassembled a MANN oil filter for the 616/7 engines.

Here is the cadaver. As you will notice, there is a dent on the side that made me feel less guilty about hacking the thing to bits.



I first tried to get the top off by assaulting it with lots of sharp tools -- lots of them.



Realizing that I was getting nowhere, I tried a can opener as per OM617Yota. That worked like a charm.



That pretty white thing on top is basically paper -- when you take it off, you find cotton that looks like it's been in a fight.



So at least it was well packed. This is all the junk that came out of the filter. Yeesh!



Here is the inside of the filter. Both the inside tower and the outside shell are covered in some sort of thin cotton.



The outside cloth is held on by the pressed flange at the top of the filter.



On the inside cloth, a piece of tape at the top of the filter was holding the cloth on. Neither cloth was sealed in any way at the bottom.



This rubber grommet is coming out just because I can take it out.



This pressed flange needs to be unfurled to get the outer wall of the filter off. It's a pain to get started -- I used a flathead screwdriver to start unfurling it -- but once you have it going, you can use pliers to unfurl it the rest of the way. This was painful at first, but once I developed a method for doing it, it went swimmingly.



Completely unfurled.



I ended up having to hack at the top where the seam for the outside cylinder is joined so that I could unfurl the side, too.



The side seam was easily unfurled with a small flathead.





Once the side seam is unfurled, the cylinder pretty much peels right off.



It's off.



The center tower is held on by five spot welds at the base. Here it is coming out...



Here's what's left.



I started to peel the top off. Some sort of rubberized compound is holding the top onto the rest of the assembly and also holding the fins in place.



Now it's almost off.



Now it's off.



I stopped here, but it is interesting to note that the compuond here on the bottom is a tan color while the compound on top is gray.



Here is everything we took out.



All in all, only one blister and one cut (all for the sake of science, of course). Not bad!

I'll post an explanation as to how the filter works later, but duty calls and I must step away from the laptop for a little bit...

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"Senior Luna, your sense of humor is still loco... but we love it, anyway." -rickymay ____ "Your sense of humor is still loco... " -MBeige ____ "Señor Luna, your sense of humor is quite järjetön" -Delibes

1982 300SD -- 211k, Texas car, tranny issues ____ 1979 240D 4-speed 234k -- turbo and tuned IP, third world taxi hot rod

2 Samuel 12:13: "David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die."