spiffy wrote:I don't buy it. I didn't even have the oil bath on the engine I just removed and it never noticably suffered.
Nice to have, YES.
Absolutely necessary to have, NO.
Spiffy, nobody is "selling" you anything here. There are people who swear by their own experiences til the day they die, "I never had a thermostat!You don't need them!" The fatal error in the preceding statement is
I blah blah blah
you don't need blah blah.
Every year I am confronted with IAC customers' personal experiences and beliefs, and do you think I jump all dogmatic on them? Heck no. You can run your engine with no air filter at all if that is what your personal anecdotal experience tells you. But I come from a larger sample of many people's experiences. So I have a responsibility to try to offer something more than the fact that I have never dropped a valve, never blown a rod, never ruined a set of rings, never seized an engine, never blown a spark plug, never had a fire, never had a carburetor fail, never wrecked a set of points, I did blow a fan belt in 1979. . . . . anyways, I do not use my personal experience as a launch for "you don't need" or "you must have".
I do use a form of consensus however. It comes from factory literature, accepted best practices, others' experiences, and my own history to a point, yes, but as a part of the whole.
Let's talk about the fact that you CAN drive a VW engine on three cylinders. You CAN drive without the foam seal. You CAN drive with a missing preheater or a clogged heat riser. Fine. You can drive with an oil impregnated K & N air filter, but I promise you, it wasn't the hard driving that makes those K & N filtered dual carb bugs start smoking after only 120,000 miles. Ask your military buddies what they want to filter their vehicles with in the desert. I'll wait here for your answer. Then ask yourself once again, why would VW go through all they went through just for preheated air and a warm intake manifold? Does your experience with the lack of an oil bath air cleaner or a missing preheater answer the long term questions about reliability, carbon build-up, piston ring deterioration, over a one or two or three or four or five hundred thousand mile span? I cannot answer the question. I don't know. I have never run an engine without that equipment in good order.
Colin
BobD - 78 Bus . . . 112,730 miles
Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
Pluck - 1973 Squareback . . . . . . 55,600 miles
Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles