JO's gasified 92 Volvo

Especially fun with the manual transmission. :grinning:

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JO how did you seal your hopper lid on this one?

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Started out with just stove rope in a grove, but after first lightup I noticed the rope wasn’t thick enough to avoid metal-to-metal contact with the dome lid. I added some silicone to the rope. It sat with a closed lid and plastic wrapping over night.

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I have a fascination for homemade lids and your lid is a dandy! Nice job.

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Thanks Jeff. Not too much trouble though, with the premade dome.

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What did that dome come off from?

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I’ll guess his favorite building material, propane tank! Looks just like the end of our forklift tanks at work

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Right! What was left when cutting the firetube
:fire: :test_tube:

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Thanks for the ride in the valvo car on wood gas a few pages back,Lots of nice contry seenery out your way allso, Hope you have good luck with your new wood gas vehicle, Once you iron out all the little vacuem leaks/ and or pluged char dust filters, seem too ran great otherwize. Your butterfly valves breaking probley fixed part of the low vacuem / Did the tennis ball valves help with plumming damage.? And thanks for sharing your DOW experiments as your are still ironing out the glitches.

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Thanks Kevin.
I’ve only made a few trips with the Volvo since installing the tennis ball valve and no intake puffs so far. It 's been raining on and off and with no trunk lid I voted for the Mazda to handle every day work commute.

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I could have waited longer but I was curious about what to find.
Still less than 100 miles but I harvested maybe 2-3 gallons of slipped char. Not much ash and fines. Hopefully they stay put where they belong and do their insulation job.
I expect to see less slipping when the charbed gets established.

https://youtu.be/-Y5_LyjjDL0

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Is the trunk of the Volvo isolated from the back seats? I know in my Buick Century I wouldn’t be able to have an In Trunk reactor because the back seats fold down for more space.

But you could drill out some drain holes at the low spots in the trunk for rain problems. Or God forbid condensate pools up somehow.

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That does seem like quite a lot of char. But then again you can just screen and dump it right back in. And probabluly the amount will reduce, as you sayd. Looks great!

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Cody, the seats are not foldable and there’s a wall behind them, but not air tight.
As soon as a spare lid falls into my lap I’ll cover the trunk. I’d like to keep wood bags, insulation and any other luggage dry.

Kristijan, I believe part of that char is from prefilling. Also, I’ve done several lightups and short trips to help with buildup of ash and fines inside the firetube. Any longer trip will probably consume more char and slip less. A few 100 more miles will tell.

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As suggested on Volvo racing forums I grounded two pins on the ignition module to get 6 degrees advanced timing.
Crawling upside down with your head stuck under the pedals isn’t my favorite working position. Especially when everything closer than 5 feet is blurry nowdays. To be able to solder on those two wires I needed two pairs of reading glasses. I could have used three of them but my nose isn’t tall enough.

I don’t have a timing light and listening to the motor when switching grounding on and off, I couldn’t tell any difference.

I went for a 30 mile ride and I had three intake puffs. All of them at moderate accelerating after slowing down. How much abuse can a throttle body butterfly take? I don’t remember ever having intake puffs on woodgas before.

Power wise the Volvo is running better on woodgas than I could ever have hoped for and the gasifier is running very cool. The operator just need a bit more time to manage this new beast.

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@JO_Olsson that is one of my least favorite places to work on in a car. Having to lay over the threshold and try to push up with your legs. I am also with you on the blurry vision. Once I got bifocals, I noticed how hard it is to position your head close enough or far enough from something to see it clearly, and of course, you can often not get that perfect distance when working on a car.

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Never had much problems with the TB with backfire, but l did blow the lid off off the filter housing a couple of times :smile:

The puffs didnt happen before you spoofed the timing?

I belive it was told here once that the reason for such puffs is that the slow burning gas still burns at the begining of the suction stroke, igniting the gas in the manifold trugh the intake valve. Am l corrrect?

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Bryan, I think it’s called aging. Undesired stiffening of parts of the body - lenses, legs and back.

Kristijan, it seems you’re getting old too :smile: The reason I’m installing puffer valves and trying to advance the timing in the first place, is intake backfires.
Wayne mentioned a couple weeks back he was able to avoid backfires just by adjusting his driving style. I hope to get there eventually. So far I’ve discovered they occur just when I start accelleration after slowing down. I don’t know yet how to avoid that and still getting somewhere.

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Good morning JO.

The picture of you wearing the glasses looks a lot like me when sharpening saw blades :smile:

About your intake backfires or coughs. It has been a very long time that I had a backfire from my dakota, maybe a year or two . But on my v-10 Ram I can make it backfire from the intake. If the transmission is locked in a high gear and running at a very low rpm ( 1200 ) and I very quickly go wide open throttle It might backfire . If I go to open throttle slowly it will not backfire or if I am in a lower gear it will not backfire . I think on this truck it has something to do with the fact that the spark plugs fire at the top of the compression stroke and also at top of the exhaust stroke and a quick open throttle does not give the computer time to adjust the timing for a slow burning fuel and gets fire into the intake valve .

Again, because I know how to make the truck cough I also know how to avoid it :blush:

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Hm… I wonder, since this Volvo engine has a crank sensor only, it might suffer from that same double spark syndrome.
I performed every possible electrical trick the racing guys suggested and during today’s test ride I had three more backfires. All when accelerating after letting the pedal up into a corner or accelerating after an intersection idle.
On the bright side, this machine has a lot more power on woodgas than any of my previous rigs. I’ve never been able to keep accelerating much past 3,000 rpm or past 60 mph for that matter. This one just keeps accelerating, as heat builds up in the char pile :grin:

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