After getting a lot of good information and feedback here I switched to the Microgard Extended oil filter for my 2024 motorhome (Ford E450 - 7.3l Godzilla V8). Very happy with the quality of the Microgard. After I took the Fram off I drained it out and cut the top off the filter. I don't have a fancy oil filter cutter so the Dremel tool got it done. I was curious if the filter had the ripples everyone is talking about in the leaf at the bottom of the filter. Took it apart and cleaned up the leaf. It looks flat to me, no visible ripples or any that I could feel. I put the leaf up against the bottom of the filter element and it sat flat without any voids that I could see with my naked eye. Maybe I got lucky or maybe Fram got their act together. This filter went on the vehicle in September 2024, purchased from Walmart so I don't know how long it sat on the shelf.
Removed the Fram Synthetic Endurance and replaced with a Microgard Select - looks like I got lucky with the Fram.
- Thread starter SkipCam
- Start date
Thanks. Second good one I’ve seen this week! Problem is you never know what you’ll get…
Nothing wrong there. But even if there were ripples in the bypass plate, I suspect that the effect is way over imagined by many.
It's possible someone from First Brands/Fram/Champ Labs is reading this forum. Motorking use to be the feedback loop to Fram before First Brands took over. Bad press usually makes people perk up and do something to correct an on-going issue.
With evidence of many leaf springs with large ruffles and a resulting big leak gaps have been shown many times here, it's not really "imagined". A big leak gap is going to bypass oil around the media, just like a tear in the media would do. If people accept leak gaps between the leaf spring and end cap, then they should also accept torn media.
You lucked out for sure… I can tell it was about to ripple any minute. 
I would love to see anything that shows flow rate from ripples in the bypass valve plate are equivalent to torn filter media. Of course not all filter tears are the same, but it seems the later would be much more restrictive.
Of course media tears are all over the place, just like the leak gap on the leaf spring are. If you knew every filter of brand X could have some sized media tear in it, would you still be using them? Based on measurement taken by @Glenda W. on a pretty bad example Endurance, I came up with a 15% leak. There's a 59 page thread about that filter. It really doesn't take a very big leak gap to achieve that much volume bypass. Like mentioned often, it's hard to judge how fluid flow behaves without actually doing the calculations - just looking at something and trying to guess how the fluid flow is going to behave is often way off base. A full flow filter ideally shouldn't constantly be bypassing any dirty oil past the media.
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What was the actual date of the filter?
Here are some bad examples. The seal was obviously compromised on these filters.
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