That johnboat is really going at a good clip, looks like 5 knots give or take.
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Good Morning Jakob .
Job well done 
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I’m with Wayne too, but I’m a little jealous of your water ride. 
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Is the long prop shaft for running in shallow water? If so, does the shaft have some kind of skeg near the prop to keep it from digging into the bottom. Now you are making me think about a charcoal powered jet drive. Nice work.
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that is the idea. there are actually some around here commercially made. they call them mud buggies. I haven’t put the log jumper on it yet. with this prop system you can run the prop in any depth of water the boat will float in. actually yesterday we floated into a mud flat the boat actually bottomed out so Jesse had to take a swim and pull it into deeper water, but before it bottomed out. we were running the prop an inch under water.
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Ok so a lot has happened since i last posted. We finished the drive system and dad painted everything while i was at work the other day. then we have spent three days trying to get this machine to run again with little success. Day one we went through two spark plugs they started arcing down in the plug instead of jumping the plug. the engine wouldn’t even run on ether. By the time we fixed that we had used up all the char we had with us so we switched over to gasoline and tested the drive unit which worked very well. yesterday dad went to try to start it (I was out driving the ice truck) And it started doing the same thing intermittent firing. I was close to a harbor freight so i went and bought a brand new engine. It was actually the last day of a parking lot sale so it was $50 off. this morning i put the new engine on and we still couldn’t get it to run. After a while we noticed that when we put a blower on it and got it hot and immediately tried to start it we usually could, If we would spray a bunch of water in the intake of the gasifier. it would run for a few second then die. So we started thinking that maybe the gasifier isn’t getting hot enough to crack the water under engine vacuum. I thought that maybe if i put a restriction in it it would heat up the gasifier just like it does on a wood system. I called Don Manes and he confirmed that idea. I did not haver a restriction at all so I was running a full 7 inch pipe firetube wide open. I found a big roller wheel that came off of a skid steer track system that had a 3 inch diameter hole in the middle. I welded it to the plate that I cut out of the end of the firetube plate and laid it down on the grate and sealed the edge with ash. I poured the charcoal back in and it still wouldn’t run. I called Steve Unruh. He gave me two pointers, one my charcoal is all soft wood so it might be burning up really fast and turning into co2 especially since my air nozzles are so big. So I emptied the gasifier again and turned the 8 mm holes into 4-6mm holes in my nozzles by welding the end partially closed I imagine it is going to be hard on my nozzles and they will probably wear faster but at this point i just want it to work well. After that i poured the charcoal back in and re-lit the gasifier and got it hot with a good flare. it didn’t turn over 3 times before it started. 
I then shut it down and reinstalled my filter ( I had taken it out of the system to make sure it wasn’t to clogged up and that was my problem) after that it took a little more to get it running again but it was obviously working better. I ran it as long as i dared so i wouldn’t start melting stuff because my cooling tube isn’t running in the water.
I believe what was happening is what steve and i discussed. It was in heater mode. there was too much air entering the gasifier so it was making co2instead of co. The only way we had it running before was on better charcoal which wasn’t as much of a problem and when we pumped a bunch of water in there and made h2. when the fire cooled off enough from the water it just started sucking water into the engine and it would die.
this is the restriction, Videos are still uploading .
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Looking good Jakob, and Billy. Glad you all figured it out about the differance between soft and hard charcoal. Do you remember how your truck ran not so good on my poplar wood and you had to mix in hard cherry wood? I always mixed both together when I drove my wood burner truck. The Lesson learned back then and now on a charcoal gasifier. More of the 75% under your belt. It does depend on what kind of charcoal you are using and how the charcoal gasifier is set up for what kind of wood we are using. This was some great learning and teaching out of your ADAP Tech Projects School for us all.
Good job Professors Don M. and Steve U. for being a part of this schooling for us all.
Bob
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Add in Tone too.
According to JacobN. it was Tone who gave him the air nozzles smaller ID calculations.
S.U.
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So we found another problem.
the sock I was using for a filter was getting sucked up into the gas outlet pipe and making it very hard for the gasto reach the engine. now that I have replaced the sock filter with a small hay filter in starts and runs very well.
We are heading out tomorrow morning to show it at a missions conference in PA.
there are more videos around but I have been on the ice truck since 2:30 this morning so they will have to wait. I just figured I would let everyone know that before we packed it up for travel it was running great, and if you follow the procedure right it usually takes less than two revolutions for the engine to start.
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I think another good filter media would be like Hoghair furnace filter media. The stuff that looks like a scotch-brite pad.
They make washable variants of Hoghair media so it would be pretty serviceable. But they might not be able to find that in remote locations where you’d be on Mission helping make these. I’d maybe layer up hay and then pine straw or another finer media, charcoal gasifier ash is aggressive and could scratch the cylinder lining.
When I ran a sack filter I made an internal bag out of window screen to help hold it open better. I bet just packing a sack with hay would work just as well.
Edit: A few other agricultural media you could use with the hay could be flax tow, sisal fiber(usually from agave), Jute fiber, sheep’s wool. Some WW2 gasifiers used a lot of Sisal as the fine filter media, at least in the one’s I’ve seen where they actually described the contents.
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Sisal Twine is baling twine used in baling hay. I see piles of this around here. I wounder if this could be used in a filter for the filter media. Wash it down real good then put hay on top of it. It does break down if left out in the sun light.
Bob
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Maybe as a replacement for hay, but you can also get the fibers in bulk amounts for cheap and it’s much finer.
For the twine I’d chop it up into 6" lengths like hay bale hay. It’ll stuff better and won’t leave big gaps like a bird’s nest of twine would.
It should be easy to get in South America as well, Brazil is a big exporter of it.
I’ve been thinking of experimenting with cut grass, mom got an electric push mower with a catch bag for going around the house.
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What are you guys using for final filters there is still some soot making it through the hay?
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Cody, Bob, that is not a bad idea I will have to try that out.
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My bag material is some kind of upholstery, I got from a friend that worked in a textile mill. Feels like some kind of poly blend. I’ll take photos of it with light showing behind it.
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Jakob, you must have read that I use raw sheep’s wool for the filter medium. At the bottom of the container there is a grid to distribute the gas evenly across the cross-section, here I insert a layer of 20 cm of sheep’s wool, then a layer of 20 cm of sawdust, then a layer of fine hay and, finally, a layer of sheep’s wool on top, which surrounds the oval final filter made of felt. I can say that it works perfectly and the water drains nicely from the wool. The tractor has done 150 hours on wood gas and so far the intake line is completely clean. Let me not forget to say that I change the filter material every 40-50 working hours and what pleases me the most is that all the material is biodegradable and is not harmful waste, just like plastic or synthetics.
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I am planning on using a bag for the hay in the hay filter, with another bag of sawdust on top of it. @Matt only uses sawdust in his ammo box filters so I figure it must work pretty well.
GC
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Jacob, I use hay in a nitted wollen bag. Not perfect, but good enough for me. I believe it’s more important to prioritize breathing capability if you’re running a motor which you expect to operate within a wide range of power.
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What JO said ,
plus 20 characters
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