Hi Cody, you mean the gas cooler right? The type cooler the finn’s use are often of Mikkonen’s design, or copy’s of it, i think it’s much like you say, they are compact, efficient, and easy to clean. This type mostly have a water/condensate container in bottom, where incoming gas either bubbles through, or “sweep’s” the water level, by means of bringing some water up in the pipes, wich runs back, keeping the pipes clean, and also helps heat transfer.
Also, as you say vertical piping is somewhat easier to keep clean.
One drawback is stainless piping have bad heat conductivity, but it’s, almost unlimited life-span weight’s up for it, stainless also seems less prone to clogging, probably due to hard, smooth surfaces?
The filter can be seen to the left, the lowest “hopper” directly under the blue circle.
There is also visible a electric cooling fan in front of filter, to keep the filters working-temperature lower.
With all that stainless steel up in the air over the cab of this vehicle. Did they also bump up the horsepower of the engine to compensate for the lack of aerodynamics flow of the vehicle? It would be like driving into a head wind of 40 mph all the time at highway speeds. 20 to 30 mph not so bad.
Bob
Hi Bob, this el Camino is described in Mikkonen’s book, a lot of experimentation on that engine, if i remember correctly, he blow’ed it up three times during test’s with higher compression ratio, turbocharging and compressor charging, i think i’ve read somewhere that the last “edition” with supercharger, reach somewhere around 90 mph
Edit: Cody beat me to it
I am going to have to just put up with a little stainless steel in my cooling rails and my grate.
Everything else recycled mild steel painted my favorite color black. Engine stock from the factory.
Bob
I just think it’s certain beauty in every woodgas-build, they doesn’t run faster because the shiny stainless, only holds up a little longer, every build has it’s interesting features, and is a special work of art, anyways for us “woodgassers”
Goran I was re-reading some of your older posts you said the gasifier has an SMP chip style cone. Do you normally run wood chips? Or is the cone still friendly to chunks/blocks?
Hi Cody, no i don’t have the chip style cone, i have like the bigger type for chunks (not exactly like SMP, some own ideas), i have never tried chips in this one, only in my old Volvo-build, where it didn’t work out well, lot’s of bridging problems.
The Volvo wasnt chip style either, i think i maybe described i had SMP style hopper/cone, but i forgot to mention wich type i had, i forgot there was 2 different.
I haven’t seen much from SMP other than the translated Gengas book from the 70s, and the Chip gasifier booklet Jan shared. I don’t think the Gengas book had much in detail of SMP specific designs and was more of a broad spectrum design book.
I’d search that archive site but they don’t have an open catalogue, you have to search for it directly.
Hi all, lot’s of work these days, not much time for project’s or visiting forum, but little updates here.
First of all: I want to throw out a big THANKS to the anonymous person/person’s that gifted me Premium. First i thought there must be a mistake but ChrisS telled me it was not. I already know’ed there was nice and friendly people on this site, but this is almost to much, i bow my head to you, again Thanks!
Now for the update, i’ve done a little work at the chargas moped, hope to get it out of my small basement-workshop, to get space for the big gasifier, for welding repairs (one of the drawbacks with old, big and sturdy welding equipment, only the small tig is easy to carry outside, but works best inside)
Inside this container i should have a sock-filter, I have a dust-bag from a big, industrial bench-grinder that should fit nicely inside, probably overkill but it is to small for bigger builds.
The flanges and some piping by the way are from automotive EGR-systems, these are often changed out due to cracking of the thin, stainless pipes.
