VCCA Home Forums TECHNICAL - 1945 AND EARLIER 1937-1945 Oil bath filter decal location

I bought one from Chevs a while back and it was too large to fit anywhere on the housing. I recently bought one from The Filling Station and it seems to be a bit smaller & might fit. Where on the housing does it go? There was no decal on the car when I bought it to refer to. Thanks.

If a decal is too big to fit on any part of the air cleaner I would suspect that you have a truck air cleaner. Its smaller and does not have the air intake silencing feature. The car oil bath looks almost like the car dry air cleaner as far as size is cincerned.
The decal on my 1939 car oil bath is on the side of the housing. It is placed so that when the air cleaner is installed and the fastening screw is in the position so you can tighten it the decal faces to the left side of the car.

Here is the air filter housing. It consists of two sections, the division line is marked 1. The upper section holds the oil and filter cartridge. It won't accept the decal because of the contour (#2). The bottom section was too narrow for the decal from Chevs. Hopefully the decal from The Filling Station will fit. Is the correct position on the side of the lower section?

I was going to edit my last post but the edit option wasn't there. Anyway, it seems my filter housing is correct. <click>

You can only edit up to one hour after your initial posting. After that the edit option is deleted.

I have an original air cleaner unit with the original decal. I'll try to get a picture of it tomorrow and post it here.
-Bob

Part of the problem is there are several air cleaners for 1938 Chevys. I am not an expert nor do I own one but there are several air cleaners for 1938 Chevys, among them are Standard type, Oil bath, truck (maybe more).

The 1940 parts book shows the 1935 and 1936 passenger car oil bath A.C with no govenor also fitting 1937 and 1938 cars. The 1939 being a different number.
The air cleaner pictured on your car does not look like anyhting I have enver seen on a Chevrolet.....not says its incorrect, I just never saw one like it.

Mine doesn't look like that either. My air cleaner also has a shield that is created at the front of the air cleaner to prevent air from entering the front of the cleaner at too high a rate.



This shows the cleaner, decal and shield.

Brian

Curiouser and curiouser. Looking at the picture scan from the manual in the link I posted Fig. 82 seems to show a filter housing like Brian's & Fig. 83 shows a housing like mine. Hmmmmm

Edit: When all else fails read the instructions. Reading the text of the manual advises my air cleaner (Fig. 83) is the "heavy duty" cleaner for autos. Interesting.

Brian's air cleaner is the common dry mesh air cleaner used from 1937-1948 (on passenger cars)
Look for the picture of the oil bath in your 1938 shop manual.

I have pictures of the oil baths from the '40's and '50's and none look like that.

The oil bath air cleaner on Old Blue ('37 Half ton) looks like that shown in Tiny's photo. It does not match any shown in the '37 shop manual either.

Tiny,

Have a look at page #4 of the members photos. There is a collection of some of the air cleaners that came with my car.

One of the photos shows the disassembled guts of the filters.

Which one looks like yours inside?

Gene, the link I posted is a scan of the shop manual, the same as in my shop manual. Fig 83 is my air cleaner. As I noted it's the heavy duty oil bath filter for the car according to the text in the manual. Fig 82 shows the standard housing as in Brian's car.

Tim, I guess I'm too dumb to figure out how to get to page 4. All I can find is two pages and no air filters.

Tiny,

The photo and your air cleaner do not appear to be exactly the same. The bulged section on the top half of the cleaner on yours is only a part of the top half while in the fig 38 cleaner it is the entire top half. This implies that your cleaner has a smaller element than the fig 38 cleaner. Could be a mid-year modification but it could also be that the filter you have is from another car. Plus the decal for the air filter may not apply to this type filter so it should not be installed.

The Chevs of the 40s decal is correct for the 38 dry filter, the Filling Station's is for a different year.

Brian

I'll have to check with the PO to see if he knows anything about it. The car was given to him when he was 14 by the original owner.

Here you go guys. The second filter from the left is the same as mine.
Click

Note the remains of a red lable on the lid. Actually they used a stencil , not a decal originally.

Do you have a Canadian car? From the text it looks like that is a possible Pontiac but could be original if you have a Canadian car. It looks to fit and it is obviously not a dry filter, so the sticker would not apply anyway.

I think I still have a filter 38 housing with most of the original printing. Not that anyone really cares, but I'm getting older and I seem to start rambling on about stuff that doesn't really pertain to the topic.....

Brian

I'm sure it's not Canadian. It was one of the first cars sold at the new Chevrolet dealership here in town. It was sold to a farmer/postal carrier so the car spent a lot of it's time on dirt roads. It's possible the air cleaner was changed by the dealer when the car was sold to get the extra filtering capacity. Shortly after the dealership opened the owner expanded to sell Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Cadillac and GMC trucks. Tim advises he thinks it's a Pontiac housing which would fit the scenario if they didn't have a Chevy housing in stock at the time.

Here's a (poor) pic of the air cleaner housing on my '37 Sports Coupe, built in December of '36. The car is in unrestored condition and I am the 3rd owner. The air cleaner is identical to the one I had on my '37 Town Sedan, which I owned previous to the coupe.

The VIN tag is very different in Canada so it's not a Canadian car.

The oil bath filters were options so like Tiny said, it may be a case of what the dealer had in stock or if the dealer had more than one model line, may have come down to what the purchaser or mechanic chose for the application...

Found it! This is the best version of the original printing I have been able to find.



Brian