Very good link on making throttle plates. I made my own, but not nearly as nice or tight fitting as I would have liked. I just drew an ellipse on paper with a square and trammel, then glued to sheet metal and cut out and filed. Now adapting the idea in your link, a non machinist could mount a piece of sheet on a bolt mandrel with a pair of wedge washers and spin it against a grinding wheel.
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Pepe, thanks for the videos, that’s helpful. To answer your question, I do have a Ben’s condensate provision built in, as spec’d in his book. So far, this has collected some tar. I do not have a drain welded in yet, that will be on this weeks list.
Here’s a few pics of the throttle plate I worked up. I learned a few things doing this, made a few mistakes, but I’ll cut the next one better. It also is still much too thick, and needs faced down thinner.
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Nice! I wish I had those tools and skills
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Oh, man, to have a lathe. Nice work, I like positive control adjustment. Your 6 cylinder generating system is impressive. It’ll be nice to hear it run on woodgas.
Pepe
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I rebuilt my lid. It now does not leak. Very nice! I had used a silicon rope material for the seal that was not nearly pliable enough to conform and make a seal. I replaced it, and rebuilt the lip it rides on.
Went ahead and tried another run today. I broke up my charcoal into bits about thumb size. I did find quite a bit of the bigger charcoal chunks in my bagged charcoal were not fully converted. More like charred wood then charcoal. I put the still-wood bits above the level of my jets in the hopper.
I played with it for about 50 minutes. Still didn’t get any flareable gas, unfortunately. Lots of white smoke for the first 10 minutes or so, then it became more wispy. I smell like a smokehouse. 
Makes me want some BBQ!
I suspect that I may not be pulling enough CFM through to get proper conversion? The blower is one of the only places I’ve deviated from BenP’s design, due to lack of availability. I do have a pitot tube and can figure my blower CFM - anyone have a rough idea what I’m shooting for?
Back of a napkin guess: Sine this is sized for a 4 liter, and we’ll assume it can sustain a fast idle at 1100 RPM
(1100 RPM) * (1 intake stroke / 2 revolutions) (4 liters displacement) = 2200 LPM =~ 75 CFM?
I also suspect that trying to ignite the gas coming out the end of a pipe is probably not the best burner design… But it does seem to work in video’s I’ve seen?
My other thought is perhaps my char bed needs to be even finer grained. Not sure at what point it will clog, though.
I’ll keep playing with it. Next time, I’ll take pictures of my feedstock before I burn it. I’m learning that Mr. Keiths assertion of woogas being 75% operator rings true.
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NickL thanks for the pictures and plate making information.
A very warm welcome to the DOW as a Doer/Contributor!!
The American inline cast iron intake/exhaust systems were designed to put exhaust heat up to the intake base for gasoline fuel vaporization.
Good for gasoline fuel economy. Good for emission reduction. Sucks for power.
Striagt woodgas fueling make sure that the cold running exhast heat vlave (if present) is jammed to hot running position.
Down the road you will get best woodgas power benfit going to an aftermaket tube exhaust. Exhaust tape wrap this to keep the heat-in from rising up to the intake. Use that retained exhuast heat down stream to pre-moisture remove and warm the just before hopper dumped in wood load.
Doug Williams on his NZ Fluidyne site has a neat easy-build engine exhaust wood fuel drying/conditioning system shown under his “Power In The Hills” topic.
Since you are ST only 1800 rpm operating no sense doing anything to the intake side of this engine.
Best Regards
J-I-C Steve Unruh
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What kind of blower do you use?
Can you make the fan push air in the gasifief? This way you get more gas production per same fan output and allso can be sure no air leaks mess up with you.
For what is worth, the charcoal in my gasifier is about the size of peas. Thumb size might still be too big.
Thanks for the tip, Steve. I did notice the unusually close coupling of the intake and exhaust manifolds, but didn’t think too much of it at the time. Makes sense what the manufacturer was trying to do.
My ST is further driven through a belt that gives me an even slower engine speed. Around 1200 RPM. Slow enough to be quite and durable, fast enough to have enough rotating mass to smooth over startup loads, as well as keep plenty of oil pressure up.
I’m actually using the internals from a BucketHead vacuum cleaner for my blower right now, tied in to a dimmer switch.
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A bucket vac is plenty of power, if you turn it up as needed.
We tell folks to go backwards and forwards to establish a char bed. Try adding in some reverse blowing (blow air in from the outlet, lid open) alternating with sucking the gas the normal way.
Don’t worry about the char, if it’s burning at all, it will take care of sizing itself. It will take some cycling to get things settled in.
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From what I gather at the moment you are having a problem just getting your gasifier to make a flare at the moment , so i think what i would do is check for air leaks coming from the Gasifier up to your flare off pipe , the easiest way would be to use a small fan attached to your flare off pipe and blow back into the Gasifier and with a spray bottle filled with water and a little dish washing soap soak every joint and seal on the Gasifier and filter and pipe work and watch for bubbles , also try a tin can over the flare pipe, easiest way is just make a hole half way up the can and with both top and bottom cut out place the tin can on your flare pipe .
If all that fails then start looking at that BBQ charcoal and dump it out and make some good engine grade charcoal yourself .
Good luck
Dave
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I’ve gone ahead and pressurized the system, looking for leaks with some dish soap and water in a spray bottle. What do you know, I found a few pretty good sized ones right where there would be hot woodgas. For those familiar with the design, it’s around a flange that holds the grate assembly into the gasifier body, page 84 in Ben’s book.
I’ll have to re-work this. I’m pretty excited, I love finding problems - now I know what work needs to happen. 
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Good that you are learning from falling down. That is the DOer way.
Woodchunk/chip gravity feed drier is here:
www.fluidynenz.250x.com
L.h.sidebar list:
“Power Generation In The Hills”
Ha! made me really go notebook back to find that. Then i see my tricky memory served me wrong. Doug Williams is using producergas heat in this.
No matter. I will use engine exhaust heat in my BenBuilt early prototype chip bin drier. ( have to boot out the nesting chickens though)
The BenBook system as i said is really too shallow to allow agueuos condensate to separate out from pyrolosis oils.
You need the taller hopper add on to do this.
Differences of intents/opinion use here on the pyrolosis oils.
Some want to collect.
I want them to all drip down back into the “hot-furnace-hell-of destruction” just in front of the nozzles. More in system heat then made with these hydrocarbons. Less noxious wastes made.
If you ever go DOW Premium side you can see that Wayne in his WK system clearly recycles these again and again down to a Tertiary (Jim Mason) asphalt tar. Wayne removes from the system the mostly aqueous hopper condensate and the heavy asphalt tar separately.
Stationary you need a forced air flow past your extended hopper to do this.
Stationary you need a forced air flow past your system gas cooler tubing.
In the best Chicogo stockyard “turn a waste into an asset” tradition you will need some forced air flow past that water cooled Ford in a coolant radator at some times. Even a CHP system doesn’t need the “H” for months of the year.
Again a choice desision of how to flow these airs.
many would use three different electric cooling fans. Each with it’s own command/demand power system.
This Ford engine and it’s larger 300 CID brother used by Onan for big world wide use tow-able generators had a reverse bladed belt driven engine mounted fan. Hugh amount of air to be desert use capable. At least 10 engine hoursepower needed there.
Your engine already set up for this: a clipped blade reverse mounted fan ducted blowing first trough an engine coolant readiator → that warmed dry air then past the gasifier unit gas colis and hopper.
CHP? Your engine thermostat could be set up to offsystem heated coolant flow primary and only radiator flow in ecessive engine heat duening heat needed season. Full allow through engine radiator as thermostat regulated out of heat nneded time of the year.
I like see-do (or not do) systems much better than fritzing with DYI electronic control systems.
Just me. Too many years going behind real professional engineers, simplifying down to reliable.
J-I-C Steve Unruh
throttle valve 8 inch . What I needed was a flue damper . Have gasifier . I want to build new gasifier from existing wood gas boiler . At 170 degree water temp want it to change from boiler to gasifier at 145 degree change back to boiler or change back to boiler when engine stalls . Now boiler shuts down at 180 degrees by stopping forced draft .
Nice, that’s a big butterfly valve. Closes off well enough to stop the flow against the natural draft of the chimney?
I think I’m with you Steve on reburning off as much heavier-chain hydrocarbons as possible. My end game is creating wood gas, I’m not particularly interested in side products right now.
I do have a radiator with electric fan already that I intend to use. My thought was that with an electric fan I could remote mount the radiator in the future. I also had the same idea of using engine heat for space heating.
I also like simple, robust systems. Overbuilt. Big, slow, durable. These are reasons I opted for the ST head and old Ford I6 engine. Both of them are built heavy and durable.
That said, I do plan to do a clever trick with my air and throttle controls - I think I’m going to control them from a Raspberry Pi computer via servos. I’ll use sensors to get RPM and exhaust oxygen content to adjust as needed. A bit of futzing will be needed to develop the control algorithms, but software and math are my long suits.
If/when I get around to that, I fully intend to open source all the code for the community.
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I thought a regular damper would let in too much air . I will also need to seal blower fan , Thought I would use big tin box or popcorn tin . then I would need to open tin for normal operation .
I just got Raspberry Pi will have to wait for expansion board , just wanted it for simple interval switching . . I was having discussion on wood vinegar PHD in Kentucky paid by EPA to work on project in African country . I don’t produce much condensates . I have a woodward governor … oxygen sensor is out maybe that is why engine started working
Raspberry Pi’s are pretty neat little computers. It helps if you have a background navigating around linux systems. For the type of work we’re doing here, I’d look heavily into writing your code in python, it’s an easy language to work with, and the GPIO library is great. Remember your GPIO ports can only drive 20 milliamps or so, you’ll want to buffer almost anything with an NPN transistor, and anything serious with a proper electromechanical relay after the transistor.
If you follow that advice, BE SURE to use an appropriate resistor between your GPIO port and the transistor!
I had the wood chip fueled generator for three years and just got it working . The thing I needed to do was restrict the air flow into the gasifier . I did this with a gate valve . I don’t want to think about programming the Raspberry til I get the expansion board . I thought I might need more parts to do such a simple thing as bypassing another computer .that wants a switch closed every five minutes or it will shut everything down .I think I can find a program I can set to close a switch every five minutes for 30 seconds .
Of course, you’re free to attempt that any way you see fit. And Pi’s are so cheap and powerful - it’s really not a bad platform to learn how to use. It could suit you well for a wide variety of uses. Additionally, I don’t know the full details of your circumstances, so my thought on this is based only on what you’ve told me in this thread.
Personal opinion… but if that simple automation is all you’re looking for, there are MUCH easier ways to accomplish it that don’t incur all the overhead of a full fledged operating system. You’re looking at running a full computer system, from the kernel right on up to daemon services to accomplish a simple autonomous control output. If I were attempting that, I’d look into delay relays or at a minimum, a 555 timer circuit running in astable mode. Cheap, easy, reliable.
Take a peek at these:
http://www.circuitbasics.com/555-timer-basics-astable-mode/