2nd Gen: oil filter housing cracked while driving.

09 dclb 4.0 with 400 000+ km on the old girl. I'm posting to ask the experts why my oil filter housing cracked spontaneously (female threads for the pressure sensor). I bought the truck used in 2015 and the sensor and housing are OEM from what I can tell. Is it probably just time taking its toll and inevitable? I was driving home for about an hour with a few hundred pounds in the box, no codes (except TPMS, naturally). My spider-sense was tingling so I popped the hood and see oil had sprayed radially from the belt. I certainly caught it early because it wasn't a huge amount of oil and the dipstick was still well in range. My first thought was fk, it's the crank seal again. Upon further inspection, there was a slow stream from the oil pressure sensor next to the filter. Thread tape: no. Gasket maker: no. New sensor: nope. Tightening it past spec: made it worse. Deciding its behaving like a crack and not a wash, I ordered an oem housing replacement and put it on last night. The old one was indeed cracked. I'm just wondering if it could be a symptom of another issue. One of my pulleys had started to whine about a week prior but I gave it the quick and dirty and sprayed a little lube on the noisy pulley and ran it until the whine went away (about 5 min of idle). Could a worn pulley contribute to a higher oil pressure that might have caused the crack? I'll change the pulley and belt next.

 

Can you post a picture of the crack? Might be able to tell if it was cause by an impact that slowly got worse, manufacturing mistake, etc., but with that many km it may remain a mystery

 

The housing is sold aluminum, the only way it would crack is if someone overtightened the oil pressure sensor or it was just a bad casting.

You would blow the filter can off from excessive oil pressure long before the housing would crack.