ALERT-WARNING LF9070 Fleetguard oil filters

This is an extreme important warning for everyone using Fleetguard LF9070 oil filters on ISX engines. We are finding the inner o-ring is either getting cut during installation or failing sometime thereafter. Pieces of the o-ring are getting pushed further into the engine oil galleries, commonly in the oil riffle that feeds the pistons cooling nozzles. The o-ring pieces are partially or fully blocking oil flow, or disturbing the spray direction causing piston overheating and eventually liner scoring and then failure requiring overhaul. This issue was brought to our attention from one of our own customers back at the end of the summer. This customer does his own services and had a piston failure. When we rebuilt the engine we removed the piston cooling nozzle to check it and that was when we found the chunk of oring stuck right in it. The customer still had the old filter and sure enough a chuck of the inner sealing oring was missing. We have our eye out for this. So far we have found 3 other ISX engines that have pieces of the inner oring missing when doing an oil change. These are our customers and we did the services! All three had the oil pan taken off and piston cooling nozzles taken out, and all three did indeed have pieces of oring in the nozzle feed oil gallery. We have taken this up with management, and so far we are being stonewalled for any information or help. Cummins says it is either an installing problem or a manufacturing defect. Fleetguard is saying nothing is wrong with their product and the oil filter is being installed wrong, or the oil filter headers on these engines is wrong somehow, typical! I really don't think we are all installing oil filters wrong. We are thinking the oring is too soft, or not properly secured on the inside of the filter below the threads. When removing one of these filters, simply look inside and make sure the whole oring is still there!!! If not, you have to pull the pan and remove all the piston cooling nozzles. The orings are hard to see because everything is black with oil. We have also been successful in using MIG wire to reach up into the gallery and actually push a piece that was in between nozzles to the next hole and grab it. We have been letting our customers know. We did one yesterday and that customer supplied his own filter. He brought us a NAPA 7745XD filter. This filter looked superior to the FG one and had an internal grommet that looked really good, no cheap oring. We are now recommending this filter to our other customers. Again we are having a hard time getting anyone at Fleetguard to listen to us. I am reaching out to anyone else who has encountered this so we can stop it from causing a failed engine.

 

This would be completely random and by chance. Depends on how or where the piece goes. It could get lodged somewhere totally harmless or block a port to a main bearing. Could take 5 mins, or 5 months. The truck we did yesterday had 3 pieces in it, all accessible from the nozzles. The scary part is the three pieces came from more than one filter because the filter removed yesterday had 1/3 of the oring missing, but we found enough to make one full oring!

 

Those pictures above are from the first encounter back in September or so. I will try to get more of the actual filters.

 

I am pretty sure this problem is with both filters, I will check for sure this week!