Make a piece with double lips to act as a channel for the stove rope.
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I won’t know if this works until I get some stove rope and more silicone but it sits on here without rocking.
I still need to clean it up and round the edges but I want to see if it seals before getting too much more work into it. My homemade box was welded inside and out but I’ll need to check it for leaks too.
Looks like I used about a pound of flux core welding wire today but I have close to a 5 inch square opening to reach inside instead of just using the 3 inch square tube I had that I was thinking of using.
I only tacked the lip for the stove rope. Hoping the silicone and rope seals it good enough. Hopefully I can be back running on charcoal gas soon.
This will make cleaning it out and changing the nozzle a lot easier.
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on my gasifiers i do not use silicon for the rope, i have the double lips higher, so the rope stays from alone inside…on the two ends of the cut i make some windings of adhesive stripes…til now the stripes are keeping up with the heat…i tried this because not having silicone here…
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I found an old piece of stove rope and had a partial tube of silicone left so I put it together.
I figured silicone and charcoal dust wasn’t making a big enough mess so I smeared some grease on the surface of the new box.
I’m hoping that stops the silicone from sticking to the surface so it will come back apart. I reinstalled the old nozzle first so, if I don’t have any leaks, I can get this running again soon before seeing if it will come back off without messing up the seal.
It looks like it could work. I was worried I didn’t leave enough of the bolt sticking up on the right side.
Will have to wait for the silicone to cure before testing it. Half of the tube I used was already solid so I guess it’s a good thing I used it up instead of trying to save it.
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A lot of us use cling food wrap or wax paper between until everything cures.
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I got impatient and tested the gasifier for leaks and didn’t find any so I filled it back up with charcoal and run the generator until it shut off.
Used almost half the tank of charcoal so it probably either got too much of a burnt pocket of charcoal or it just didn’t have enough charcoal above the nozzle to produce good gas.
EDIT: Just going to slip this in:
The gasifier was really hot so it was probably time to shut it off anyway but I got most of my new filter welded up using charcoal to fuel the generator.
I was cutting the pipe for to outlet of the filter when the generator quit. I fired it back up on gasoline to finish the last couple cuts and to make sure the generator was still going to run and to flush out anything I might have put in it using charcoal gas.
I expect there to be leaks in the filter because the generator running on charcoal doesn’t run the welder as good as it does when running on gasoline but this will need some form of gasket to seal the two pieces back together so shouldn’t be a problem.
I didn’t time this run but I run it pretty long and was pushing it pretty hard most of the time running the welder and my gasoline gage still shows full.
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It is amazing how just wood tar down in a sealing slot area mixed with stove rope or welding blanket fiberglass will seal things up. It get hard and seals. It is very mess though. If we can get a way from all the high heat silicone products in making gasifiers it would be a great savings. Show use more on how you do this Giorgio we need to know your secrets.
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bob, nice the picture of your inventor workshop…on another topic…
with my sealing of lids , there is no secret…as i use only coal, there is no tar what can glue the rope gasket in the metal seal surface…i make relative large sealing surfaces so from 5 mm to 12 mm to avoid consume of the stove rop by sharp small metal sealing surfaces…than , when i use a 12 mm rope, i make the gutter, where it lays in , smaller, in way it keeps from alone without glueing by silicone or others…on the iron glue surfaces some rust can make, that the stove rope glues on, therefore always a bit of grease on the metal surface is good…with stainless of course this problem not exists…
but i give also on all sealing ropes a bit fat on, first for avoid that all the fine fibers go away in air, second because the rope is made from a number of strings, and there are of course hollow spaces…with a bit of fat they got closed, and even more if some fine ash settles with a while on the fat on the gasket, when cleaning and so on…
i use not the round shaped rope . but the square shaped…
the adhesive stripes on the cut ends are keeping well til now, but i think if it is not the case on some build from someone, i can immagine the cut surface could be also glued together with a bit of this silicone, in way that the ends not can open…silicone on the cuts, and than putting the rope in his gutter - strong seat - cutted end strong together, should also work , i think, when the silicone remains elastic, there i have no experience…
only is to take in consideration that the seal rope shrinks with a while by pressure of the lock screw…this is to observe for the lock mechanism construction.
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I do pretty much the same Giorgio with tongue and groove and the rope seal in the groove usually on the hatch side. Only a few dabs of silicone to hold the rope in place and seal the ends.
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For those wondering how my simple pipe nozzle was lasting so long…
This is what I found when I opened it up today.
I don’t have time today to mess with it but I’m going to have to put a different nozzle in before I run it again. Haven’t decided exactly what it will be yet. I have a needle valve and an air mattress pump ordered to add a water drip and make lighting it easier.
The new access door will make changing the nozzle possible for experimenting so I might try a flute nozzle or a vertical pipe cap with holes drilled in it.
I have that carbide piece but even a 1 inch coupler isn’t big enough to mount it and I don’t want to use it yet.
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Try a piece of 1 1/4" pipe. Clean out the weld seam with a file and you should be able to press it in with an arbor press.
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Okay Giorgio, that is very similar to what I am doing using a small sealing area edge in a deep slot. With stove rope. Except mine is impregnated with high temperature silicone. I am going to try it with just stove rope and sealing it down tight to get a seal on my next hatch cover I build. If I can eliminate using any silicone the better I feel for cost of building gasifiers. I forgot you only do Charcoal gasifiers so you do not have any wood tar to use.
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Not all couplings of the same size are exactly the same Brian. I have those hexaloy nozzles and they will slide into some brands of couplings and not others. Easy enough to just take a dremel or similar tool and a burr and just rout out the threads a little. Those hexaloy sleeves are kind of fragile and chip pretty easily.
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And I have found that the hexaloy nozzles are not all the same size either.
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I’m sure I can figure out how to mount the hexaloy nozzle when I am ready to use it. Mine had a chip in it when I got it which was probably from the seller cutting it. Shouldn’t be a problem but I will be careful.
Can I use a water drip with the hexaloy nozzle?
The water drip is my next addition I want to add because my quick and dirty testing (squirting a little water into the air inlet pipe) noticeably smoothed the sound of the engine. I couldn’t really tell if it increased the power but a more controllable water drip should allow me to test that. I did see Gary’s simple fire burn cooler when he added the exhaust gas and I assume water would do the same plus add a little hydrogen.
I’m still considering this build as my practice gasifier which is part of the reason I don’t want to install the hexaloy nozzle yet. It might get installed in this one when I have another gasifier to work on but I am looking forward to experimenting with different nozzles.
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Water shouldn’t hurt it, also yes water which gets hot and turns to steam will help cool the reaction and add hydrogen.
You can notice the difference, RPM can increase and flares can be stronger as well.
Exhaust return doesn’t add much if any power but works well to tame the reaction. A combination of both may result in too cool of a reaction.
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Like Cody sayd. In some engines the difference is huge. Like “it runs great” vs" “barely runs at all”.
A IV drip is excelent for the tests you plan to do, if you can find one.
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The needle valve and blower should be delivered sometime tomorrow but I needed a new nozzle for my gasifier so…
I didn’t have threads on both ends so I just welded a washer over the back and blobbed on a bunch of weld to fill in the hole. Nothing fancy. Hard to tell how long this will last but should get me making electricity from charcoal again.
I only drilled 4 holes in the 7 inch long pipe around 1/4 inch diameter and screwed it into the gasifier trying to get the holes facing up.
This was a little harder to light until I started drawing air from the outlet instead of blowing air in like I had been doing. The mattress blower should make lighting it much easier and not require compressed air.
Still not finished with the new filter but all of this was welded powered by charcoal. My plan is to make this similar to the bucket filter I’m currently using. The gas will come in the bottom, through a filter (probably planer shavings), and out the top pipe. I’m going to use hose clamps or maybe just wire to attach pieces of felt over the holes of the “T” piece as a final filter and to stop any planer shavings from getting sucked out. The bottom will get a pipe plug as a drain in case it collects any condensation.
I was going to bolt the lid on this like I did with the access port but it fits pretty tight already. I might just make a silicone seal on the main tank and call it good enough assuming it doesn’t leak or I might use a spring or bungee cord to hold it down. I might even fill it up with whatever filter media I decide to use and silicone it shut. I open the bucket filter just to check on it but haven’t done anything to it for a while. Seems to be working good. I could always cut the silicone when it needs opened.
It will probably get some kind of legs to hold it up high enough to get to the drain plug. I haven’t noticed any condensation in the bucket filter but the planer shavings probably absorb any that gets in. The drain might be useful to wash the filter media. The threaded hole was already in the propane tank where the valve used to be so it needs plugged anyway.
In case anyone is looking at this and thinking it kind of looks like that down draft gasifier…
Yes, the thought did cross my mind.
Is all this effort worth doing when I could just buy gasoline or use “real” electricity? I’m having fun experimenting with the gasifier and it still amazes me that I’m making usable power from charcoal that I made myself from sticks and scrap wood.
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Restarted the gasifier and finished up the filter all except adding the silicone and testing it for leaks. This filter shouldn’t get very hot so I just got the cheaper clear silicone so I might just put some on the inlet and outlet pipes just in case I have leaks.
Not sure if this will make any difference but I put some hardware cloth over the inlet pipe.
Then I added some planer shavings pressed down but not packed tight and put pieces of felt over the outlet “T” pipe.
This is the new filter but the lid isn’t sealed yet. The generator wasn’t running as good as it was earlier so my welds were lumpy but are holding so far.
The gasifier is still hot so I’ll probably have to wait till tomorrow to check on the flute nozzle but I’m expecting those small holes are getting blocked. I burnt about another bucket of engine grade charcoal today finishing up this filter which means I saved probably a couple hours worth of gasoline by using the charcoal gas.
I don’t expect this new filter to work any better than the bucket filter I have been using since it’s basically the same thing but I’m still hoping to mount this system on a base as one unit instead of being spread around with hoses all over the place.
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Yup, Dude whenever you stop having fun, just stop, and find something else to do.
But you’ll come back to woodgas eventually. You’re one of us now.
Rindert
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