Very good point. You will normally find a waffle magnet of large proportions will be fitted in the ‘box’ in those cases by the manufacturer, you’ll find one in your gear box regardless of whether it shares engine oil or has independent oil in fairness. I’ve yet to rebuild a box and find one without. And the volume of iron filings on the magnet in a gear box is always truly shocking. Once it’s saturated tho it will catch no more. This is where as you point out a magnetic sump plug is a god send when oil is shared by box and engine.
by far the best oil filters are OEM
So Mazda do manufacture their own oil filters and they are far better than any made by oil filter manufacturers?
No. But you miss the point.
Mazda (or Ford, depends who designed the engine) specify the requirements of the filter. An official supplier builds a filter to that specification. The car manufacturer tests and eventually releases the car to the public as a for sale vehicle.
Pattern part manufacturers reverse engineer the components and then make pattern parts. Or more likely, sell one of their existing parts as being compatible.
So… long story short, the OEM part fits and works as designed. Any pattern part may be just as good, but is unlikely to be better - and may be fundamentally flawed as an important design element was missed. (You do see pattern parts such as this K&N filter that offer additional benefits such as the easy to remove nut. These do not change the original functional specifications, so will not be better for the engine, but enhance usability with new features).
In the case of filters for a decade old design, pretty sure any pattern part sold as fit for purpose will be ticketyboo. But on very new vehicles, I would be more circumspect.
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That’s absolute rubbish. They are commonly made alongside other brands on the same line by the same people from the same materials.
Also, you can always improve on a design no matter how good it is, why else would Mazda do recalls?
Not to mention that OEM parts are made on a financial seesaw. Have to be good enough but have to be cheap Enough to turn a profit. If they made them as good as they can possibly be the car would be £100,000+ and have a McLaren badge.
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Sorry, it isnt rubbish.
McTrucky is absolutely correct. I worked for a large international vehicle manufacturer for forty years.
We had unbelievably comprehensive specifications, one of which covered oil filters. We spent many millions on R&D including working with suppliers to develop the best filtration (etc) possible for our vehicles. Our information and specifications were ours, mostly patented or copyrighted.
We had legally binding contracts with all our suppliers that prevented them using our designs and intellectual property on any other products.
We regularly bought after market parts to test and evaluate.
You also need to bear in mind that an OEM is the entity that stands the warranty on its products. Aftermarket manufacturers don’t have this and tend to make to a price.
For an OEM cost is extremely important, they were always looking to reduce costs, the value of components was well over 90% of the total vehicle cost, but all cost reductions were thoroughly tested to ensure reliability wasn’t affected. Every part has a design life, things were not intended to last for ever.
In life things go wrong, and nothing is 100%, often it’s human error of one sort or another that causes issues, even the best industry, aerospace has the odd hiccup…
We like others did buy many off the shelf items to use on our vehicles, things like spark plugs, electrical components bearings etc. these type of items are common across makes.
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It depends on how you define total cost. If you just take a simple ‘bill of material’ with no other costs then yes probably. But to get a vehicle to the end of the production line as a saleable item then I think may be not. Research and development, the capital cost of buildings and complex machinery, wages and other operational overheads would surely be considerably more than the sum of the actual parts.
Notwithstanding any of the above, one thing is certain, the cost/benefit will be carefully assessed for everything from loo paper to the most complex of items.
Nearly back at work then---------------------------those were the days!!!----------retirement is better by a long way and I don’t need spreadsheet to calculate that one!!
That’s not an attractive proposition 
There are a million companies making products, so you’re saying Mazda are the best?? I’d question that.
I’ve worked in the industry for 28 years as a process control engineer with an electrical bias. I’ve worked in most of the automotive manufacturing factories in the U.K. installing and maintaining plant. You see some eye opening things. And you think Mazda make their own parts and don’t buy them in?
Cost is irrelevant when a K&N is £13 and a Mazda one is £10.
Just my opinion/judgement, I have no special knowledge about this -
You can’t go wrong with a manufacturer filter for normal use and recommended service intervals - i.e.a Mazda one from dealer or MX5parts. You need a reason to use anything else.
If you look at a few of the many oil filter tear-downs on youtube, you’ll see that the K&N is undoubtedly a well made quality job, with the bonus of the hexagon. Just bear in mind that K&N claims a high flow rate - this is a racing thing, so it’s a plus if that’s what you do. However there’s an obvious trade-off between flow rate and filtering efficiency so it’s possible, likely even, that the K&N will trap a slightly lower percentage of a given size of particle than a good quality filter with a lower flow rate. Your money, your choice. But if you belt round a track at high rpm and full throttle this might be for you.
If you’re in warranty use Mazda only. Mine is just out of warranty but has a dealer service record and for now I stick rigidly with Mazda parts - if the engine fails next week I’d hope for some goodwill from Mazda which I would be less likely to get with a ‘foreign’ part on there.
Oil filters are cheap enough, buy a good one. For convenience and well out of warranty I wouldn’t worry about say Bosch, Mahle or Mann. Some old names I wouldn’t rely on - the Crosland name was bought by ECP and I don’t know who makes them but it isn’t the old Crosland.
@Mrbarry
Just a couple of observations.
I worked in a cheese factory where it was more economical to run cutting and packing 24x7 than to stop and change product to flex to fluctuating demand. This meant that sometimes the most expensive extra vintage was packed and sold in a number of guises, including Tesco Value packaging for around 20% of the sale price of the same product in premium packaging.
So - does that mean Tesco value cheese is as good as the much more expensive premium product? NO. But it does mean that sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t. It also means that if you happen to like the cheap cheese, sometimes you will be disappointed even though you are unknowingly getting a more expensive product.
In the world of oil filters, the same will apply, sometimes you will get the best in the cheapest brands. But you may not get consistency.
But as already said, don’t think it matters much in an old well established fitment.
And of course we all know Mazda buy parts in. The parallel with McLaren is also relevant. I worked there when we launched the MP4-12C, I don’t think ANY components were made in house. Just assembled. And when you talk about the engine, McLaren worked with Recardo to optimise the packaging, but certainly did not specify the internal workings and design. So when you buy a McLaren oil filter, it was not manufactured, designed or even specified by McLaren. But that does not mean you should just spin on an eBay special come service time as the people who built the engine did specify the requirements of not just the filter, but also the oil.
Lastly, and less revelevant but perhaps interesting, I worked trackside with Tyrrell when they ran v10 Ilmor engines, and were sponsored by Elf. The engineers specified the oil and Elf produced several batches to suit, but Ilmor engineers were never happy with the Elf oil and we ran a different brand out of unlabelled containers. The point being made here is that if Mazda put their name on the box, it will work. Maybe lots of other brands will work just as well. But maybe not.
Again, I think any decent known name oil filter will be fine in a 10/20 year old MX5, I am not an OEM evangelist. The above is just debate.
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Hi Flow is just not “low flow”. I that respect they are probably all “high flow”
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I think Crosland branded stuff comes in from India. There’s loads of these old British brands that were busted by cheap stuff coming in from Asia. And where they weren’t, they were bought up by this or that larger outfit, and their brand name consolidated into the bigger outfit’s product line. Eg.
Pagid, Don, Textar, Mintex all owned by an outfit called TMD Friction.
As for oil filters, I go for Mazda branded, where there’s £2 or £3 difference between them and good aftermarket. However…, my daily is a recently acquired Yaris Mk2 . First job was to change the oil and filters. As I was going into the local dealer for something else, I bought the oil filter there too. After waiting for 10 minutes for ‘Russell’, the parts man to appear, and another 5 or 10 for him to re-appear with the filter… it cost £11.40 inc VAT. . If I’d gone to the motor factor 1 mile along the road, they’d have served me immediately, and a Mahle filter would have been around £6 or £7. Next time, it’ll be a Mahle.
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Is the Mazda/ Ford oil filter unique to the particular engines then?
I had always cynically imagined that oil filters were like air filters, wipers and spark plugs in that manufacturers use off the shelf solutions where possible with one filter having a number of applications across various makes of vehicle.
Just out of interest if you have Mercedes passenger car you will have the same filter as a Mercedes commercial (with the same engine) but you will pay a much higher price from the dealers. I understand that they have different part numbers but the filters in the boxes are the same.
Don’t you just love it when accountants and marketing get together???
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Back in the 1980s/1990s my Dad had an old (even then) Mazda323 in Africa. It was cheaper to buy Escort parts and send them to him airmail than to just buy the Mazda branded same parts - before sending them out there.
Remember that higher flow for the same size equals less filtation. In any case, there is no point in fitting a higher flow filter, as the flow is set by the oil pressure relief valve (which limits the system pressure) and the amount of oil which the bearing clearances will pass!
The same considerations apply to K&N air filters, where the engine’s demand for air sets the flow rate, unless the filter is blocked. As the K&N is of lower surface area than the corresponding OEM filter, but passes the same amount of air, it passes more impurities. Their fabled life between cleaning is a sham, as most of the oil is lost quickly - and the oil is the filtering medium.
If K&N are that good,they would be used on earth movers and trucks, where a cyclone (ie Dyson-type) filter with an oil bath have been the norm for ages.
I’m a bit late to this conversation but I would say - oil pumps are gear pumps, are they not? In which case they pump at a fixed rate proportional to their speed. Which means a “high flow” filter seems a little spurious - the flow will be exactly the same, because it’s fixed by the pump speed, irrespective of the filter. The only thing that changes would be the operating pressure, which varies anyway, rising as the filter blinds over time.
Personally, I just stick to genuine Mazda filters, rather than oem or otherwise.
Cheers,
MarkP
I think you’ll find that flow can be higher at any given pressure dependant on resistance of the flow path.
Oil filters are all the bloody same regardless.
Many years ago, when I was a BMW bike dealer, we were under cut on price by pattern oil filters, until people realised that the saving was done at the expense of not having a pressure relief valve. When engines went bang people learnt their lesson. I fitted a K&N air filter to my bike, but was persuaded to revert to OEM when I saw the state of it, when I changed it in Malaysia. I was riding round the world and heading for India so needed the best filtration. I managed to fit OEM oil filters everywhere and stick to OEM filters in my MX5. An oil filter is cheaper than a piston.
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