Hello Fellow Gasifiers,
When Steve Unruh offers to save you a year or so off your life, please take his advice. He offered me the same a year or longer ago and I went merrily along with my FEMA build. I was reluctant to accept advice on a subject since I didn’t(relatively speaking) know squat about building a gasifier. The FEMA was comfortable, a drawing I could build from, envisioning my own 50 yr old IH Cub chugging along plowing, Farmer Pepe grinning ear to ear! lol. Now I offer you the same advice, Steve’s through years of experience and knowledge and mine from that year or so of finding out for myself that the FEMA is a good tar maker. There are 2 types of tars, water soluble and sticky non water soluble roofing like tar. It produces a burnable gas capable of running an ICE, but as the name implies FEMA is for emergency use. The tars eventually (soon) gum up valves, etc and require tear down to clean out the ICE. Even though the Fema is easy to build from scrounged materials and I learned a lot(except how to take advice lol), was all that effort to get a flare worth the effort in the end? IMO, not. Why? I concentrated (and you will. too) on building without doing much to learn the processing. Hey, build it, light it up and watch the flare. Then I lost the flare and had to stop and study to get a clue why this just happened! Advice to read and plan (on paper!- forces you to think about what’s happening here), present for critique, an invaluable tool of member knowledge and experience, but better yet is the willingness to share. It certainly inspires trust. I feel like a neighbor just a little further down the road.
I went on to the fluidyne 25th anniv design and then to my GEK type imbert by the numbers which produced a very clean ICE running gas. Guess what, I’m still retrofitting! Now for the preheat mods that should have been built in in the first place. I know some will try to retrofit the Fema to get imbert results ( I thought about it, but saw Andy’s vid on the fluidyne and went for another straight forward design) Build an imbert the first time for long term results and most definitely include preheat- thank you Chris for driving this home for me. I now understand that preheating is one of the mechanisms that provides the reduced oxygen atmosphere for the reduction zone You don’t need an hourglass shaped hearth, a straight tube will work well also and save the hassle of a cone roller build. I’m in the Dutch John third gasifier category, but I’m there and more psyched than ever about refining my gas.
I offer some pics and a vid to show you what you can expect from a running FEMA gasifier. I did not run an engine with my FEMA, but the self sustaining flare indicates a gas capable of doing so. I enjoyed the build, but it’s not where I would start now. The good news is pine needles are a good filter medium. Pine cones are not. THE LAST PIC is my GEK type gasifier filter after 2+ hours, clean as a whistle, except for a bit of new start up crud.. Remarkable difference in hearth temperature
Please don’t think I’m putting down FEMA builders, I’m just trying to point out some facts. From where I sit now, I would skip the fluidyne, too. You’ll have to way improve the preheat there, it doesn’t exist, the 5 nozzles open to outside air through the shell. I’ll report, you decide, as they say.
My FEMA gasifier 7 21 11 remake- fast forward to 7 min 12sec for the sizzling tars in the flare tube. These are the some of the same type tars that ended up in my fluidyne filter pics here.
UPDATE: 1-31-13 This was the filter on my fluidyne with the unwelded reduction tube and flange.
I ran my FEMA without a filter and quickly moved on.
