Posts by Zoom
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They do get clogged from that black stuff, but what we are saying is you can clean it out pretty easily. I bought a couple spares off ebay for cheap and I just rotate them in. Clean the dirty one and put it back on the shelf until I need to change it again,
Like Vytasb posted, ebay. I think back when I got mine they were 3 for about that price. They ship from China, but if you compare them to the stock filters you can't find any difference. I'm not sure that's not where Suzuki gets theirs from and just prices them like they were hand made.
They do something, whether you call it clogging or not. If you notice in the cutup filters above, you don't see pieces of sediment, all you see is the fibers are darker. Now whether that color change is actually causing them to flow less, I can't say. And like BigPapa said, I've had no issues with the ebay filters. I've only bought one or twi OEM filter and have used the cheap ones since. I don't ride near what they do now, but back when I did I would swap and clean them every couple years or around the same 8,000 miles.
I don't think that's it, but who knows. I've cut a couple apart and the filter media inside doesn't look like it would slow flow at all, the cover over it looks to be more restrictive. I've taken used dirty ones and poured gasoline through the nozzle on the filter and it runs through with no resistance, but that is reverse the way they normally flow. Maybe that cover gets clogged enough that the filter collapses under suction?
Another oddity. You hear of the filter showing as a problem when the bike starts dying at idle, way more than they start bogging under power. That never made sense to me as the flow through them at idle has to be very low. I don't know if that shows it fails in two different ways or not.
And another oddity, Suzuki actually calls it a fuel strainer, not a filter. Everyone else calls something like that a filter, but maybe they don't intend on it to actually filter, just to strain out larger particles. It might be just semantics but I always found that odd too. And they aren't really consistent on that, the parts list calls it a fuel strainer, the service manual calls it a "fuel mesh filter".
To expand on cbxer's comment, the 109 actually has two filters. If you look at the parts diagram there is a filter inside the pump that is listed as "Fuel Filter (for high pressure)" and then the one we change, that is listed a "Fuel Mesh Filter (for low pressure)". I've never heard of anyone changing or cleaning the filter inside the pump, or even if it can be. Kind of sounds like the same design as you mentioned on your Honda. There are instructions in the service manual on how to disassemble the fuel pump, but no mention of the internal filter in that process.
There definitely is no schedule, or not that I've seen. I've changed mine about every 10,000 miles just for preventive maintenance, and it's never had any symptoms of being clogged. No stumbling under acceleration or dieing at idle.
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