[adouglas]

Okay, so I bought my bike a mere six weeks ago, at the end of July. I changed the oil in mid-August, just before my 2,600 mile vacation road trip (Fram filter, generic (but proper spec per the manual) Castrol 10-40 from Wally World 'cause I didn't have time to find motorcycle-specific oil).

It's now late enough in the season that I'm just going to let it go another month or so and change the oil when I put the bike up for the winter. But tonight I happened to be near a Cycle Gear, so I figured I'd pick up a filter and a couple of quarts of oil and support a bike-related business at the same time.

I went back to the filter shelf, and found Fram and K&N. Having read a lot of Fram-bashing posts, I decided to open up a bunch of boxes and examine them.

There was NO consistency in the Fram filters, and I looked at half a dozen filters. Oozing glue, poor assembly (uneven pleats), rubber seals set askew etc. on EVERY SINGLE FILTER. I did not see one filter that had zero visible defects on it. To be perfectly honest I didn't see anything that I could actually point to and say "that's going to kill my engine" but the overall lack of attention to detail really set off alarm bells with me. In today's highly automated production environment, one unit should look exactly like another every time.

Then I opened up a K&N filter, which cost all of $2 more. Huge difference. Perfect assembly, more substantial O-rings and they even include a drain bolt washer (copper and thin, not aluminum and fat).

I bought the K&N.