Here’s another question that I think can be relevant to this topic, Header Design.
Stock manifold?
Tri Y 4-2-1 Header?
Or the good old 4-1 Header?
I keep seeing the 4-2-1 is better for lower to mid range power band for cruising or for trucks that haul/tow stuff and the 4-1 header is optimized for high rpm power band.
Would one be able to conclude that a 4-2-1 Header would be beneficial for woodgas? Or would the aided scavenging hurt woodgas?
It will aid woodgas.
Anything reasonable you can do to evacuate exhaust gas lets you draw in more fuel to burn.
Good to know. In my B2000, I had changed out for a Pacesetter 4-1 header, mostly because that was the only design anybody with notoriety offered. For the Cavalier I’m seeing a lot of 4-2-1 Headers so I think I might go for that after some time. I’d like to have a unit working in the car before I go modifying anything to see if there’s any noticeable gains.
anything you do geared to low rpm and mid range will help.
You can get high rpm.
So long small runners that give you velocity at low rpm are better than large and short
I don’t know what a 4-2-1 header is.
Hello Tom, this system uses the shock of the first cylinder to discharge the fourth at a certain number of revolutions, the same happens with the second and third cylinders, the engine breathes easier and develops better power
I guess I’m out of the loop. I have never seen that before. Price seems good.
I just want to remind you guys that header diameter is real important here.
It must not be too large.
And longer is better because you want to give the header more time to flow and draw gasses out…
Small means higher velocity and more interia so the flow will help draw.
Drawing on a gasifier is a HUGE pumping loss and thats what kills so much of the engines power.
The engine itself drives the system.
And a Pipe tuned for low RPM is the only thing thats going to work.
( also keeping the rest of the exhaust free flowing like choosing mufflers that flow well.
Maybe even glass pack muflers…
All this and your not going to get a huge gain from it.
Tom I have always know that as a tri-y header. To my knowledge it was pioneered by Stan’s headers here in Auburn Washington who is sadly closing there doors after I think 60 years of custom header building. A previous employee of his Doug Thorley left and took the design as well, building his own line of tri-y headers. Dyno proven low end grunt, great for 4cylinder applications. Around me as I have talked about before there is a HUGE following for the Toyota mini trucks and Suzuki samurai, both 4cylinder grunty low horsepower engines that like rpm. Extremely capable off-road rigs. The tri-y is the most popular bolt on upgrade for the Toyota 20r,22r,22re and Suzuki 1.3 and 1.8. they are wildly popular even at the 500$ price tag. I’m sad to see Stan’s closing there doors, I learned a lot from him and my best friend’s dad spent 25 years working in his shop building custom exhaust
Good, well stated working conditions of an engine fueling woodgas system Mr Wallace.
Makes a fellow think . . . a charcoal system can’t but have less suction drags on the engine, eh.
So should have less power loos compared to gasoline then. Nope. Has if anything a higher comparable produced power loss. That woodgas’s H2 and CH4 must indeed be wonderful stuff.
Now the point I wanted to point out on four cylinders exhaust tuning.
V-8 engines with just a rare exception are most definably NOT just two inline four cylinder engines Y’ed together. The many different crankshafts throws arrangements can make for 6-7 different cylinders firing orders set-ups.
As a have to do all: Independent shop working guy, like I was mostly, I had to hammer out forget my first at 14 years remembered Ford “Thunderbird” 312 in a Fairlane memorized firing order. Had to forget my 56 Chevy sedan small block firing order. Ha! And the all of the family Fords V-8’s!
Learn to just use, each time; charts, to save time, prevent taken-too-long, re-doing mistakes. Five years I worked Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep dealership and by intent, I never memorized their V-8 firing order. Got teased about that. Geeze dudes. You know Ford used two different. GM has three. (Pontiac!)
So as for a V-8 each sides “weird” exhaust pulses spacing contributing; small wonder a header manufacture would just say sod-this, I’ll just make then all 4 into 1.
Then V-8 performance guys never seeing anything differently.
Ha! And Marcus you saying tri-y keeps sending me back in my ramping up I-6 days. 3 y’ed into 1; done twice then those two stretched out into one for best torque. Shortened up and kept split for best RPM horsepower.
I like the 4-2-1 designation much better. Less confusion. All in all.
Regards
Steve Unruh
At one shop I was at I built a set of these, a 1948 chevy fleetmaster coupe. 3 on the tree, Inline six, 2 non connected tri-y headers 321, ran all the way out back for dual pipes with glass packs. A very strange sound, like 2 slightly pissed off 3 cylinder geo metros. Even with the single barrel stromberg he said there was a noticeable improvement in the low end
O.K. Fellows, here is another maybe significant factor in the best-for-sucess to woodgas IC engine quest:
Individual cylinder displacement capacity.
Now speaking from my automotive gasoline’s engines using experiences an "ideal? seems to occur between say, 300cc to 500cc displacement in each cylinder. This has been more noticeable to me in 3 or more cylinders engines. Single cylinder engines the counter force vibration goes excessive, and with only 70-80 degrees actually powering out of 720 that becomes the pre-dominate too soon. Double cylinders are hard to evaluate for this single cylinder’s capacity good-better-best too.
V-twins surprising to me follows what I’ve observed in the 300cc to 500cc per cylinder.
1200-1300cc thru 1800-2000cc four-cylinder IC engines have always just seem to be easy to make sing along on gasoline by all of the manufactures. That’s on gasoline.
Going back up to the Engineering Explained guys hydrogen fuel versus gasoline fuel he made a statement that gasoline combustion wants to end at a greater distance from the cylinders wall than hydrogen. The bigger the cylinder capacity the less wall area per 100cc’s multiples capacity.
This 500cc per cylinder might just explain why 5000cc V-8’s by anybody usually do so well on gasoline. 600cc streching up a little bit.
3000cc thru 4000cc six cylinders usually do very well also.
Of course, this is all my own subjective observations.
I understand this.
Do realize I only care about do-it-yourself home-based for personal usages power making.
So tiny, tiny has no validity to me.
Or BIg, BIg industrial.
Diesel guys what have you observed on home sized diesel engines about the sizes that seemed to work best?
My more limited experiences say’s 400cc to 600cc per cylinder.
Woodgas? Those 318 CID 5.2L Dodges sure seem to sing well. Note W.K. does not hurry out and “upgrade” to the 360 CID 5.8L Dodges.
His V-10 would be ~800cc per cylinder. The best practices upper end? 600cc per cylinder the lower?
Ha! Working; moving truck packing. Mind numbing. The mind still quests.
Steve unruh
I have Hooker headers on my 454. That’s because when I was into such things you went to the local speed shop and you got two choices. Hooker or Hedman. There was no Summit Racing or JEGs with a warehouse full of parts. Whole different world now. I reluctantly return to the TV show Engine Masters. They dyno test every set of components that may contribute to or be detrimental to performance on a wide array of engines. In the end we see results that seldom exceed ten to maybe 50 HP in 500-800-1000 HP engines. Every little thing has some effect, but none of them have any real value to you unless you are building an optimum HP per cubic inch engine. When I was a drag racer, I never raced against anyone. I had very little interest in what or who was in the other lane. I raced against my own best time. When I said a 1000 dollars for a half a second of ET that was no exaggeration. But that was only a race application. On the street that level of performance was inconsequential or resulted in even less drivability. Kind of stupid to sit at a light trying to keep that big loping cam running under 2000 rpm. The one thing we know contributes to better WG performance is increased CR. Moving a greater volume of fuel and air and burned gas in and out of a cylinder head is always the right path to performance, but I’m betting none of us are going to drop big bucks for the good stuff. We are going to keep using those crappy cast iron exhaust manifolds and stock heads. We are not going to strip those heads and spend a lot of hours with our little dremels trying to hog out those ports and polish those passages. Am I saying we shouldn’t even think about or blab on about such stuff. Hell no. I’m a huge fan, but very little of it brings us closer to real world WG performance. Why am I ranting on? I just like the sound of my own keyboard, I guess.
No amount of porting will help.
But a turbocharger…
And I keep stomping the life out a dead horse when I bring up this concept of mine to pressurize the gasifier with the turbo rather than draw on it.
I know its very tricky stuff to build but gasification under pressure is the next logical step to improved efficiency ( that and an electric battery hybrid drive for mobile application )
Well boost is what I’m trying to get at in my round about way Wallace. I have no experience with Turbos, but I do have a book SteveU gave me. A guy like me with a book can be a dangerous thing.
Where Gasification is done on an industrial scale with O2 plants and steam injection ect ect they do these reactions ABOVE atmospheric pressures to increase efficiency.
I believe at some point we have to follow suit to bring gasification to the next level.
Doing the same things the same ways since the 1930s has not lead to any significant improvements in performance on road of in stationary applications if you follow what I mean.
Ha! Ha! You’ll need to update your assumptions a bit Wallace.
The still suctioned woodgasfiers all are doing here are far more evolved and advanced past the 1930’s and even the 1940’s.
A jump forwards in the late 1950’s. Then another jump forwards in the early 1970’s again.
Governments and University works done first in Sweden. Then in Finland. The Sweds even contrating with their industrial companies for base system designs for rapid if ever the needs mass production into across usages standardized models.
And now the real leaps forwards by three different fellows for personal made systems in ability to handle much wetter fuels that’ed thermal crashed any 30’s, 40’s system.
Negative pressurized again, is for safety. No reason any more to do that with the engine if a fellow wants to invest and develope into electric variable speed and volume pressurizing system. That’s light industrial off of the shelf. stuff anymore.
And the DOW DIY guys now using digital reading out monitor instrumentation widely.
Certainly not stuck on just 30’s and 40’s monitoring.
Pressurized system? That was BenP’s University of Florida “Gator” system. they wanted first 2 bar capability. Later raised to 3?, 4?, 5? bar pressurized capable. Thicker metals. Perfect hand TIG weld. Lot and lots of flange bolts.
$50,000 contract in early 2000 $'s.
Fabbing experiences; along with hot blown woodchar learned to mange; he used later on his consumer waste plastics to drop-in diesel engine fuel substitute making.
And not just him.
KVL in Thialand.
Sergei Lagunov, who posts here is quite capable advanced on his contact industrial systems.
Francois Pal in France.
Achhh. Now I ramble TomH.
Is this contagious?
S.U.
Ya i know I failed at it.
But its still the right path.
My pockets are not as deep and time not as free as required for the idea ( keep reminding me of that though HA HA )
The internal combustion engine as we know it did not significantly change in efficiency and performance ( not to mention emmisions ) until we changed the fuel delivery systems from suction carbs to computer controlled direct injection ( the current state of the art, and its still a moving ).
Mark my words…
Some smarter guy than me with deep pockets ( and grant money I bet ) will build the working pressurized biomass gasifier for small and portable applications.
maybe it will be fluidized at some point too.
And you don’t need 5 bar.
You just need to go over atmospheric at the outlet to overcome all those pumping losses.
After that the higher pressures and temperatures will just make all more efficient.
Don’t forget the real beauty of the concept…
The process energy is the waste heat of the IC engines exhaust. ( and its free )
Wouldn’t be just simpler to just use a bigger engine to make up the losses. We are not talking about dino fuel here, we are talking about mostly free wood fuel and there is a abundance of it that is burned into the atmosphere and dump into land fills by the billion of tons every year.
I am just going to use a bigger engine with higher compression. Even building one up would be better then the expense of going the other way in building a gasification unit. I like the safety of the gasifer running on a vaccum even if I am pulling a negative 30" at times.
Steve yes you are rambling but in a good way most of the time. Lol.
Bob