Ferrari Mailing List: Re: UFI Oil Filters - no watch or gun content

[Matt Boyd (ferrari308driver]

Paul,

I don't remember the year of the event.  I decided to host a tech
session and give people free oil changes on their cars (308s and 328s
showed up).  They bring their oil of choice, and I had two vendors
supply free oil filters.  Both were from the same "batch" from UFI.
One guy had one blow on his way home, I had one blow on me a week
later, and then I called everyone that I had done an oil change for.
One guy was on vacation or business travel so he had the message on
his machine, and instead of checking messages when he got home he went
straight out for a drive and blew his.  There was a definite problem
that UFI never fully fessed up on (they claimed that apparently we
weren't torquing our filters properly).  I talked with technicians at
a few dealers/service providers and they had had a few issues, too.

You need to figure out how to determine if these are from this batch.
I have a Testarossa filter from the batch, and I don't know if
anything from that could help, but I could look up codes imprinted on
it or whatever...

-matt
'85 euro 308

On 3/27/08, Paul Bennett <pbennett [at] macnet.com> wrote:
> Anyone remember back some 8-10 years ago, a few stories about UFI filters
> for the 308 bursting, spraying oil throughout the engine compartment?
>
> I have 2 such UFI oil filters in Ferrari factory boxes dated 24-04-98,  which 
> I
> should sell but don't want to pass risk of the problem to an unsuspecting
> buyer, if in fact it is a potential problem.
>
> The information I seek is whether this was a genuine widespread problem
> or a localized fluke.  And whether it can be identified by datecode to a 
> specific
> lot of filters.  So far I've searched the FerrariChat 2003 archives, Google, 
> Dogpile
> & Yahoo and found only 1 personal bursting story by Bill Badurski FCA chairman
> - he claims sealing gasket let go due to a production problem since corrected.
>
> tks
> p