I would have thought that the oil bath would be more effective...but this cut and paste from the net does make sense....
(not my words - but he does a good job 'splain' it)
January 4th, 2010 at 4:41 pm It is a myth that oil bath air cleaners are highly effective in removing FINE dust from air—the type of dust that we see hanging in the air and gets sucked into the engine’s inlet. Oil bath air cleaners are about as effective as seining minnows using hog wire fence. How do I explain this without 10 pages of technical formulas and explaniations why fine dust cannot travel rapidly from the center of an air bubble to the spherical surface of an air bubble even under several Gs of inertia force? The air bubble traveling thru oil only contacts the oil at the bubble’s surface. Fine dust away from the surface of the bubble escapes capture in the oil resevoir which amounts to about 90% of the fine dust within the bubble escaping capture. So what does the wire mesh accompolish? Very little. Air traveling past the wire mesh’s surfaces creates a boundary layer which has a similiar affect to having a glove on your hand. When passing thru the wire mesh, only a small percentage of the air’s volume gets used as boundary layer. Most of the dust-filled air passes thru the short length of wire mesh with out contacting any oil on the wire mesh’s surface. If the length of wire mesh was say 20 feet instead of a few inches, a lot of the dust would get trapped. Inside the engine, most of the dust in the air exits thru the exhaust but some of the dust contacts the oil on the cylinder wall. This dust acts like a lapping compound that wears out the sleeve and rings. It eventually shows up as crud inside the engine or as the black color of the oil.
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Today's Featured Article - Oil Bath Air Filters - by Chris Pratt. Some of us grew up thinking that an air filter was a paper thing that allowed air to pass while trapping dirt particles of a particles of a certain size. What a surprise to open up your first old tractor's air filter case and find a can that appears to be filled with the scrap metal swept from around a machine shop metal lathe. To top that off, you have a cup with oil in it ("why would you want to lubricate your carburetor?"). On closer examination (and some reading in a AC D-14 service manual), I found out that this is a pretty ingenious method of cleaning the air in the tractor's intake tract.
... [Read Article]
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