What not to do.
99 times outof a 100 it’s ok, but… I didn’t bother climbing up into the bed and poke down after sitting for about an hour. The truck ran normally for a couple miles, but suddely lost all power and both vacuum guages showed the same. First thought was the air inlet somehow closed, but this is what I discovered opening the filler lid.
Limped home the last 5 miles on gasoline and luckily the bridge didn’t collapse. I folded a cardbore funnel and was able to fill fresch char.
If my hopper temp guage had been in working condition all this could have been avoided (it just needs new batteries )
I recently forwarded a build-in-a-day YouTube gasifier system in a P.M.
The construction and system elements were fine, dandy.
But I advised NOT following the guys operating ideas at all. As he filled only with raw wood chunks expecting instant results. Then ran his engine-generator on smoke-gas.
Only true using experiences gives a fellow all of the fall-down; got-grubby-dirty; true understandings in anything.
Opps! I guess your system problems was it did not fall down. Ha!
Best Regards
Steve Unruh
We haven’t discussed construction solutions and the use of a wood gasifier for some time, but I will give some thoughts,…
Now that I’m testing using only large pieces of wood in the Fergie gasifier, I can say that these pieces are more susceptible to snagging than smaller twig chips. These pieces “burn” more slowly and larger pieces of charcoal are created from them, all together it takes more time for complete conversion, the increase in engine load also takes more time. Chips from twigs are lighter, the hopper is filled more often, there is more ash, the conversion to charcoal takes place at a higher rate, which means that this fine charcoal fills the hot zone. I have to add one more characteristic, when using larger pieces, I have to reduce the air flow into the lower nozzle a bit, but when using wood chips from twigs, the air reaches the full cross-section (7 mm), sometimes I think that the cross-section should be even larger.
That makes perfect sense Tone, and in line with Wayne’s commandments.
Since my pickup gasifier doesn’t have a grate nor a cleanout port, fuel size and bark/ash content makes a huge difference. When the harm is already done I have no way of correcting things other than changing driving style. With too many days of puttering around home, especially if it involves shutdowns/pullstarts, I will have to vote for the pickup for at least a 10-15 mile arrend and run it pretty hard to purge fines and ash. On the other end of the spectrum, running long enough high performance trips that it involves refueling, I burn pretty much everything and collect very little in the cyclone - the charbed is borderline starved. I try to give the gasifier some slack and shut down for a while every oppertunity I get.
Both these posts proved that running a vehicle on wood gas is as much an art as it is science. The other and more important 75 per cent and also why so few people have the patience and skill to pull it off. Great admiration for those that do.
Jan, this drawing was made during development. Since then, all air is preheated - except if I by-pass the heatexchanger. I’ve just mentioned how that works in the Volvo thread.
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been a minute since I seen that movie
