Uh, no. Modern engines couldn’t handle near the dirt that the 1930-era VW design.
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My first two cars, a 1947 Pontiac and a 1955 Pontiac did not have oil filters. There was no problem with the 1947 not having a filter as the engine was a flathead 6. However, the 1955 was an OHV V-8 with hydraulic valve lifters. I had all kinds of problems with the oil passages clogging up to the rocker arms and the engine had just been overhauled before I bought the car. The oil filter was an option that year. I did go to a salvage yard and bought an oil filter and installed it, but I still had problems. Why GM did not make the oil filter standard equipment that year is a mystery to me.
LOL, you never tried to get heat in the winter in my '61 Beetle!
Air cooled engines only run hotter in summer. They refuse to warm up in the winter. 
How many cross country trips in a VW included a valve job in Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, or Amarillo? Pretty much every one. And how many people today ever have to have a valve job? Oil filters are cheap. What’s the problem, except you have to stand on your head and have forearms like Popeye to change them?
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When the oil was changed and the valves properly adjusted according to the owner’s manual valve failure was not a problem. While I never owned a VW for more than a few weeks and usually avoided working on them I did service several and found the most time consuming part of servicing them was allowing the engines to cool to adjust the valves. The vast majority that I serviced ran well beyond 100k miles. And the bottom ends of well maintained engines could usually last 200k+ miles with only a piston/jug replacement and valve job.
I always used Fram filters on my 1978 Chevy 1-ton 4X4 van, changing the oil myself. . Why not, you could almost walk under it. The first engine lasted 267K miles and I only changed because it from lack of compression-it was still running great when I sold it and had logged another 150K miles and the 400 remained tight enough to turn over the tires flooring the pedal-. Another fallacy: Quaker State oil damages engines. It’s all I’ve ever used. The moral of the story;Ignore urban myths.
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I agree with the majority here. I’ll use whatever filter is part of an oil and filter sale and many times it’s been Fram, STP, etc. Never had a problem with any of the filters.
Actually, I got into difficulty using a filter that was not a Fram. Back in the early 1970s, I had a lawn tractor made by MTD. The tractor had a hydrostatic transmission. The filter for the transmission fluid was a Fram automotive filter. The owner’s manual specified a particular model of Fram. When. I went to get a replacement filter at Quality Farm and Fleet where I bought the lawn tractor, the specific Fram filter I needed was out of stock. I looked in the cross reference manual and bought what was the equivalent under the house brand label. Unfortunately the house brand filter was a little bit longer. Every time I raised the mower deck, a support arm for the deck hit the oil filter. Eventually, it knocked a hole in the filter and I ground to a stop. I made certain from then on to buy the specified Fram filter.
Just this weekend I went to wallyworld to pick up a Fram Ultra Guard filter and a 5 qt jug of Mobil 1 FE for my daughters 14 Camry. They didn’t have the Fram in stock so I got the Mobil 1 filter that was $5 more. I got home and did the oil change, but when I got to the part where you screw in the plastic piece to drain the filter housing, the threads didn’t match. It had a fine thread instead of a course thread. Never had that problem with the Fram.
Tightening wheel lugs with an air wrench may not warp the brake rotors, but over-tightening will certainly stretch the wheel studs, which then have a tendency to break. Happened to one of the guys in my Jeep club. He was heading up a steep slope after he’d let a tire shop repair one of his back tires, the tire shop over-tightened the wheel with an air wrench, and halfway up the slope every single wheel stud snapped and his tire went bounding back down the slope. We had to drag him out of there on the end of a winch, then he used wheel studs from his spare tire mount (little known fact: On Jeep Wranglers, the spare tire mount uses the exact same wheel studs as the wheels) and one from one of his other wheels to get enough wheel studs to drive home (four will do it). Not fun.
As for Fram oil filters, they a) have less filtration media than competitors, and b) use cardboard bypass valves that allow leakage even under normal conditions. The only reason you don’t hear about Fram oil filters destroying engines is that engines will run fine without an oil filter. Remember the VW Beetle? No oil filter, just a screen. Millions of them ran around on the roads without an oil filter. So anyhow, Fram filters don’t filter as well as most other oil filters, but they’re “good enough” to keep engines from destroying themselves especially since most people change their oil way more often than recommended by manufacturers, so Fram gets away with it. Usually. Chrysler had to re-work the oil filter housing (and oil filter design) on the Pentastar engines because Fram oil filters kept exploding. (The new filter housing has a bypass valve on its top end and the new filter has a hole on that end to let oil flow through the bypass valve, the old one didn’t, thus the new housing and filter design will generally keep cheap filters from exploding).
Exploding? Are saying the paper cartridges would tear apart?
A little cut and paste over this ridiculous Fram non-issue…
I am the tech director at FRAM. The reason we are able to use less pleats and generally outperform most of our competitors is the type of filter media we use. It is a blend of cellulose and synthetic glass microfibers and is typically much thicker in cross section than many other companies filter media. The real test of filter media is efficiency and capacity per square inch of media. Higher quality media does not need as much area in the can for performance. Most offshore made filters have a ton of paper in the can, that does not make it a better filter. I guess I kind of get a chuckle when I see guys cutting open filters and counting pleats. Think about it, the only way that would be relevant is if every filter maker used the exact same type of filter media and that just doesn’t happen.
My email address is attached, always happy to answer your filter questions and I would kindly ask you refrain from using OCOD unless you mean the orange can of delight!
That term has zero basis in facts
Jay M Buckley
FRAM
(248) 808-4551
Jay.Buckley@FramGrp.com
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I am calling this either wrong info or urban legend. Usually when a manufacture has a problem with supplied parts they have the problem corrected by supplier or change suppliers.
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Agree, sounds like nonsense. Unless @elgreen99 can supply a reliable link (not someone making a claim in a forum) I don’t believe it.
As for number of pleat, how it looks, etc, it all comes down to meeting specs for dirt removal. Show me a test that demonstrates a difference, then I’ll listen.
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Wow. That engine must have had one monster of an oil pump. How much pressure does it take to cause a metal oil filter canister to explode anyway??
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Assuming something weird happened inside an oil filter to cause a major restriction, the oil pump itself has a relief valve which will bypass the filter in a case like this.
For an explosion one would have to have a total lack of oil flow plus the relief valve would have to be stuck. Sounds like a lot of coincidences to me. Along with one whale of an oil pump putting out at least several hundred PSI.
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This is a Fram oil filter for a Pentastar engine, no metal;
The Pentastar doesn’t have a metal can on the side of the engine. It has a drop-in paper cartridge filter on top of the engine that supposedly is environmentally safer. Why did you assume the Pentastar has a metal can? When I say it “exploded”, I mean that it lost its integrity and expanded against the housing, cutting off oil flow, not that a piece of metal exploded (there is no metal on this filter – if you want, I can send you a photo of the new versus old filter, I did a piece on it for a Mopar site warning people to get the right filter for their new vehicle because the filter had changed).
Regarding the other person asked about the source of my information regarding why Chrysler redesigned the oil filter housing and oil filter for the Pentastar for the 2014 model year, it’s from Allpar.com which has a good record on advance information for Chrysler engines. They had the details of the Pentastar including photos of engine blocks on the assembly line months before it was actually officially introduced. And yes, there’s still the bypass valve near the oil pump, but apparently it responds slowly enough that it was possible to overpressure cheap filters like the Fram, thus the additional bypass valve at the top of the oil filter housing. Personally, I’ve always used OEM or equivalent (Wix was the original vendor for the OEM – I can show you OEM versus Wix side by side, they are absolutely identical – so I stick with Wix when I go aftermarket) so I don’t care. All my filters have looked fine when I took them out of my engine.
If true, it’s more likely that Chrysler had a bad spec, rather than Fram a bad filter. If Fram filters weren’t meeting spec, a simple filter redesign would solve the problem. That the engine was redesigned means it was a Chrysler error, not a Fram error.
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Back in the 1950s, there were advertisements in Popular Mechanics and other such publications for porous bronze oil filter.replacement filter elements for cars. Back in those days, we didn’t have spin on filters. The porous bronze element lasted forever as it was cleaned in solvent at each oil change. The reason given that this type of filter wasn’t used on new cars was that the oil was kept so clean that it would take 20,000 miles to break in an engine. I doubt that this was the reason the filters didn’t work out, but apparently these filters weren’t successful.