Matt, I can imagine a gasifier without a neck: this is a screw with a stepper motor and an encoder that compacts the coal layer by pushing fresh firewood, based on the pressure difference between the firewood zone and the gas outlet after the grate. But what did you mean by jet less hearth??
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Those units had a concentric air knife arrangement inside the reactor. They were too complex to manufacture so the concept didnt make the cut. We later developed a flat plane version that eliminated combustion gas from entering the hopper but at that point is when I transitioned to charcoal gasification. I will never again build a wood gasifier for engine power. We are working on a wood gasifier for gas appliances and on demand heating that will produce charcoal for engine power. This will yield a very efficient CHP system that is balanced and will be very reliable and practical to use.
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Yes, Matt, everyone here at DOW knows that Matt Ryder makes automatic charcoal gasification systems! Sometimes it seems to me that this is already known even all over the Internet. 
But as you understand, your beautiful gasifiers, your tireless work on their automation, inevitably excite the minds of others, all those who dream of stuffing 75% of the success of gasification of firewood into the memory of Arduino. And sooner or later it will happenā¦ After all, if a person can control the gasification of wood while driving a car, then someone will be able to teach the same to a stationary Arduino.
I recently drew the third version of my automatic wood gasifier in Paint, but once again looking at your wonderful three-dimensional views from the CAD-system, I felt ashamed to publish them hereā¦ In fact, Iām being held back by the fact that I havenāt even lit my first gasifier. Now we have very damp, there is a lot of condensate in the workshop and I do not risk starting welding or a frequency converter to power the drilling machine and air compressor in such conditions. In addition, coughing and feeling unwell greatly inhibits my impulses. But there were mere trifles left ā to brew leaks in a tubular grate, install a thermocouple attachment of the hearth, coat all the iron of the gasifier with liquid glass and seal the joints with clay and sand.
Thatās why I decided to ask you what it could look like: a gasifier without air supply nozzles, in the usual sense of this. Maybe there are some hand drawings or sketches left?
P.S. May be that? https://forum.driveonwood.com/uploads/default/original/3X/c/1/c13f653d10c9c123ef66c2c8772e4143326793e5.jpg
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LOL you dont want to see my hand sketches I learned to operate CAD for a reason. haha.
As far as our files go they are archived and after years and years of this this would be like trying find a needle in a hay stack the size of a mountain.
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Yes that is one of the experimental units with the plane style air knife. There was a top core that goes on top with a 25% less air input to purge the mouth of its bottom opening. This would push combustion gases coming from the lower chamber down and keep it from entering the hopper. This reactor worked very well but some pellet fuels would not work and made a very thick black that ultimately threw rod caps off a $3500 dollar Kohler V twin. That was the last straw for me and dropped wood gasification at that point and will never ever return for engine power.
However we are developing the VersiFire and depending on the direction we go with its future development we may bring this back for the pellet fuel version and possible scale it up for large chuncked and wood chip versions.
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Marat, try Freecad. It will take you a long way, cam included. Free days of Fusion are over.
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Thanks.
I have an old laptop of one of my brothers. It has Windows XP installed and the Russian CAD program Compass 3D V14, a very old version at the present time. And it all works very well. Without any Internets, without cloud services and other āfashionable and solidā nonsense that works only until the first shutdown of their servers due to power outages. I try not to connect to the Internet from this laptop, because it has a bunch of old, but time-tested and various tasks, very necessary programs installed on it. Including programming Atmel microcontrollers (on which Arduino is assembled), but in the real C language, and not on crutches in the form of Java, as the Arduino IDE offers. Itās easier for me to slightly tweak the library for some module so that it works in my favorite CodeVisionAVR than to spend months debugging an important program in the Arduino IDE.
I once started my first online communication with FidoNet. Those were magical times! If everyone had their own personal communication lines today, then in the near future Fido would grow again, and even more than its previous size.
And although I am not old yet, I am already quite conservative in the choice of tools.
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If you use modern microcontrollers, you donāt need to do nearly as much low level coding. Most of the hand optimization coding is due to the trying to get 8-bit to emulate 32-bit functionality, floating point functionality, or fit in a super tiny memory. For 4 dollars (6 with wireless) you can get a raspberrypi pico, or the arduino 32-bit arm controller that takes care of the issue in hardware. The main advantage of the atmel was that it was cheap for a microcontroller at the time which at the time was 30 dollars and professional dev kits were 100s of dollars. Then it has stuck around because of all the projects done with them, and the newer arm based controllers are 3.3v versus 5v for the older atmel processors.
The arduino IDE uses gcc so C/C++ code can both be used because the C code gets converted to use the C++ compiler (it was just the opposite, but it allowed them to completely rewrite the optimization engine). There is also baremetal support for other compiled languages like Go! and Rust. both are compiled languages.
I would also second Freecad. The newer version are better then the older versions. But I understand jumping design tools stinks.
That being said, there are legit reasons to use the older hardware, but they are few and far between. You can actually copy the drive and use a Virtual machine and run that instance of Windows in a VM on newer hardware that is how I run Windows if I have to use it which is very rare. I mainly use Linux, and have for almost as long as I have been on BBSs. 
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