That much wear and damage suggests either oil starvation or contamination, then it was run until final failure. Maybe a jealous ex boyfriend added something, or she did- I once saw a high school girl with dad's Lincoln with the hood up at a c-store. She wanted to know if she added oil right. Turns out she added a quart of PYB to the power steering reservoir until it was running all over the ground.
yikes... i once stopped a woman from fueling her gas car up with diesel. some people...
but, contamination is the filters job to remove. when one wear particle gets through it makes another, they each make more, and so on and so on. stop that first one and you prevent the rest from happening and you dont get a plugged up filter. i think some of the bearings did get a bit starved from having so much metal in there. the flakes were pretty big.
Your just speculating like im going to -- college girl probably let her drunk boyfriend whip the snot & red line that motor till it blew apart after many of attempts to do so. Filter in no way caused that catastrophic damage -- pure speculation on both our parts. Its a dang shame cause Honda motors are known to be quite durable & almost bulletproof as long as you change the oil/filter within a reasonable interval.
yup, i know we both are. and that would cause a connecting rod to break yes. however in this particular engine the bearings got full of metal, spun, then caught and broke the connecting rod. if the filter had filtered out the first metal particles like i mentioned above then it wouldnt have happened for that reason. the engine would still easily have blown apart, just not from the wear particles. thats why even with your senario i think this was caused by the filter. if a good filter had been on it may have only lasted a few minutes longer, but maybe it wouldnt have broke. they do have rev limiters...
and i wouldnt say that this particular generation of civic motors are bulletproof. far far from it in fact. you can say that about other generations of civics, but not the 7th..