Hi Matt, can you do a video of you process a 48×48 pallet? It gets me a hour to do just one, and trying to get all the nails out and this is a great big pain.
Chris was using pallets in the 92 WK Gasifier truck. And when I took it apart there were a lot of nails in the ash in the firetube and in the clean out.
Do you just cut it up with a saw and process the wood to charcoal nails and all. Then use the magnet remove the metals from the charcoal?
I tried that but my charcoal crusher sizer would jam up if just one tiny nail would miss the magnet pick up. I had to be right there all the time when crushing the charcoal.
This would be interesting to all of us charcoal fans on how you process a pallet. You can show the video on your charcoal thread.
Bob
I dont use a crusher. When I store the charcoal I put in a 55 gal drum. I use a shovel to chop it up before I screen the dust out. I dont worry about the nails at all. I just clean out the clinkers every 4 to 6 runs. Easy to do in my units.
I use a circular saw to cut all the slats and then use my chop saw to cut everything down to 8 inch long pieces and chuck in my kiln.
This here is the shop heater with the bell removed. I plan to build 4 or 6 units like this as shown but using a 30 gallon drum as the fire tube and a 55 gal drum as the shroud. Each one should make around 15 - 20 gallons an hour. So 4 units would easily fill a 55 gal drum an hour. Thats 11 hours of run time in one hours time. Thats not counting the screening but that takes seconds to do.
You can see here how I chop up the fuel and screen it.
Hey Nick I will assume you are growing these exotics as a make money seller, eh.
In that case you do not want to have a wood-for-power endless project. The sawmiller guys make thier money sawing and selling lumber - NOT BY WOODGASIFING.
Why I gave you links to known, operating, useable, designs.
Here on the DOW most are edge of possibilities tread’ers.
And TomH there are a number of reasons many of us stick with raw wood systems explained by a hatful of beliefs beyond just numbers.
I, like Nick had stated are ill-at-ease with the energy losses going charcoal. Minimize these all you fool yourselves, but they are still there.
Others see charcoal as the Natis Elites fuel. Mary Antoinette’s cake-fuel. Made by get-hands-dirty sweat’ers. For the creative, cerebral types. To “skills” to valuable to get their hands dirty. Like the current buy-it, drive-it, plug-in and suck-it electric car drivers.
Still others see charcoal just in terms as becoming a commodity fuel. System then locking yourself into to just another market priced commodity fuel. Hell. Why even go off of propane or diesel then?
So I would like many here on the DOW for four cylinder and above go raw wood even if I had the personally owned hardwoods to be able to go-big with charcoal.
Ha! For my woodsplitter? My garden rototiller? Nope even I would charcoal. I CAN get some red alder and a bit of maple. Enough for hours a year use engines.
And I will refute the sale of needing advanced electronic automation for woodgasifing that APL/GEK and others continuously sell as the “must”. Utter B.S.
I can operate a manual choke carburetor engine.
Drive a stick; manual shift vehicle.
Make damn good coffee in an any heat source percolator pot.
It is just all in the touch. (wiliness to fail until you do learn to be BETTER than just the lazy served up to you)
Steve unruh
Where are the machines that run without it?? : Physics is physics and you can not overcome grate packing, bridging and gas energy fluctuations without automation. I have never seen one video or any machine run for more than five minutes without need for intervention. Any video I have ever found never shows a machine running for more than 5 minutes. This is small scale stationary mind you. For me If I cant walk away from a machine I dont want it, I have work to do and dont want to be fiddling around a gasifier.
If you go look at Flash USA, CNC machiningisfun, Hobbylogger and quite a few others. These are all well known and respected builders and all of them have adopted automation into their builds.
So I take it you do all of your systems welding CNC five axis, eh?
Or hand. By man. By skill.
Two hour system are being used MattR.
Four hour system too.
The DOW has plenty who set up running. Walk away and work for hours listening for their system to run out of fuel.
You sold to the dreamers and schemers. This has jaded you, man.
S.U.
If you remember way back we cut every part by hand lol. Building the resources I have today, seemed like it took a long time and I guess the two years it did take was a long time but considering the caliber of all this equipment that was fast.
But even today, the only thing we have CNC’d is the sheet metal. We still hand form all the parts, perform all the weld set ups and then actual welding, custom wiring, mechanical assembly. We are all still very skilled here. However if I had the justification to fully automate my shop from raw materials in / to loading pallets on a truck. I would in a heart beat!!. I also have the ability to create all that infrastructure. This does not eliminate jobs. It would create them, it would require skills of the machine builders to build and create this equipment. I would still need people to run this equipment. It would make my work environment safer, cleaner, more productive, far higher quality and my employees would still make the same with less effort. Would you prefer a non automated Ford Model T with five digit ignition and a hand crank starter with 25 hp or a modern car with electric start advanced EFI, 300 hp at 40% efficiency?
Regardless if its a bought unit or just me building for myself, I want the thing to run and do this every time I run the unit. Not three times out of four runs I want to run like on gasoline every run and that is not for my customers that is for me personally. My job is not to make money at this, if that were the case I sure as hell would not be here, Id still be traveling the world making 6 figures. I live in an RV now!! lol. My job is to improve and make this technology better. Was it broke? Nope, Was it viable?" Absolutely not and since Ive gone charcoal this really changed a lot for me. I see charcoal offering so much more and with a ton less expense and complexity. CHP is not easily done with raw fuel gasification. The unit must be running to get that heat and then you need complex systems to extract that heat. Charcoal you can simply wood fire to create both your heat and charcoal and do this very effectively. When you are heating around the clock that little bit of charcoal adds up over time. Get hot water your hot water heater goes away. you just took away that energy expense so now less tax on the system.
Making these systems automated was not to make them more expensive or complex and is not for the clients either. It is all for me and how I would want to the system to perform for myself and not anyone else. Making a system so complex just so you can run raw fuels? Why? Thats what I had to really ask myself last year. Really why?? Why would you when you can build system for a fraction of the cost with far less complexity?? Why spend hours processing small chunked or chipped fuels only to have to wait days for it to dry? Why would you when all you really need is to process in much larger pieces and let this fuel itself provide the energy to dry itself and reduce to a usable fuel and do so in way less time and work?? Why would you waste energy to run equipment when you can replace that process with a process that creates other usable and desired heat energy? Its all a matter of perspective. Those systems that run without automation how well do they really run? Are they running a solid load the entire time? if not that is unacceptable for me anyways.
The Seattle Gas Works this on a very large scale. Yes they used coal but it was gasification. They started with one gasifer in the 1909 to give people coal gases for there homes. Then the gas works grew more and bigger Gasifier built and this plant was used up to 1956, I was a little 4 years old and moved from Seattle to Moses Lake. I think my grandmother apartment building hot water boiler was using this gas.
No modern automation like electronic stuff we have today, but the old school style automation was used and lots of manpower working day and night 24/7 shifts. The coal came from the town of Cle Elam Washington.
It all depends if you want to be able to walk away from it or baby sit it to keep it going. One man operation you will need it to be designed so you can walk away and listen or know how long it can be left unattended. Or you can hook a lot of automation and monitors to it to let you know. Both approaches are available depending on how much in monies you want to spend. I like operating things hands on and little automation is okay.
Wood or charcoal will work it is a matter of what you like and what you can built. Or buy from someone else. If you are not into fabrication and build it your self but want a Gasifier there are people here on DOW that will build you one. This is what I did. The 92 Dodge Dakota (from the book) that Wayne built and that Chris had modified was for sale. It needed to have the firetube and other things rebuild. I bought it for preservation of the truck. Can the gasifer run the truck engine and a Genset at the same time? Yes and I can walk away from it. Does it have some automation? Yes it has a auto mixer on it for fuel / air ratio to run the Dodge engine.
Just make sure if it shuts down no harm will come out of it.
Look, listen, feel, smell, use your God given senses if you use automation or not use any at all. You still need to know what you need to do correctly to be safe when are doing any kind of gasification.
Bob
O.K.
Here’s two proofs of more than just 5 minute with raw wood versus the youtube stunt’ers:
Patrick Johnson showing off his last woodmills woodgassed electrical power plant. Diesel engine this time. Previously he generated with an 6 cylinder inline Chevy engine. He said he needed more generating kW power for his electric motors saws and equipment’s.
He mill powered suppled in two daily four hour batches.
Enginner775 after woodgas learning on his old Ford pickup; then a smaller stationary generator (Ha! And even his Harley) comiting to set up to be able to woodgas his whole farmstead primary residence house included.
He’d learned fuel time management. Only hopper loaded for his 1/2 hour trial period.
His previous experiences said he could hopper capacity full power for 5 hour blocks of time.
Watch these video and others on their channel and see they both do use a lot of instrumentation.
Even do some electro-mechanical flip-switch, or settable timer, automation.
But not I’s and O’s nerds; wanting to become “Made-in-China” electronic pixilated.
They are rural living. Always too much to do, real, living Rural.
Never enough time in the day. No patience for digital games distractions. No want to become one-off digital dependent.
So see Nick. Go big and it just becomes easy.
Want to stay small then still sell off your three RPM slaves, and invest in engine driven inverter generators. The route I’ve now taken.
They will always be producing something regardless of the woodgas system supply
tweekiness’s.
S.U.
Um Steve No. We are talking about small single cylinder engine systems; not multi cylinder large engines. I will agree to a certain extent on larger systems not needing automation. But a small engine stationary is a whole different story. He wants to run multiple 10 kW generators and we have already established a single gasifier is not going to cut it.
But agree he either needs to get a larger gen or get an inverter with small battery bank and combine all them into one. Use PowerMax AC / DC converters and the he can at least shut that thing off and give the ears a break for a while. I live this, I love hearing that genny run on wood gas but only for so long, silence is nice too. 
You dont need to be a programmer to automate this either. A simple 10 dollar timer board and a motor you control with it is all that is needed. If you wanted to add an AFR then my code is freely available and is solid with now many years of developing it. On the flip side why even do that when none of that is even needed with charcoal.
I would look at charcoal and start with the simplefire as Matt suggested.
With charcoal, you can make all the wood more or less consistent, and since you are homesteading, you most likely have a use for the biochar. Charcoal was used before perlite as the soil spacer in potted plants. You can more easily use all the parts of the tree. I have done roots balls, to limbs, brush, punky wood, etc. I actually use the retort to fry infected biomass, that has fungus or virus in it to destroy it. The initial cost start up cost is fairly low. The original simplefire had like a cost of like <$50. Which will not work for your application, but you get a good idea of what you need. There is a whole small engine forum, and most if not all use charcoal.
Matt brought up another point about using the heat, which is a huge cost along with lighting for greenhouses.
Given how many people come to this forum, and have how many that have had initial success with charcoal using small engines. I think that is a good place to get started.
I would still recommend getting WK’s book, not because you are going to build the WK gasifier and you may if you can find a consistent source of wood refuse like sawmill slabs are awesomely consistent, but because of all the other information. Even if you do build one, I think you will also stick with charcoal for it’s other uses. It is essentially biochar. You will find uses for it. It is much more useful then the brush pile. 
One other thing to consider is what level your fabrication skill are at. Building a WK is a challenge. You need to be an above average welder for starters. If you have those kinds of skills then you could build a wood gasifier that is fully detailed and proven to work by many over a long period of time. Some people here run over 7 liter engines with one so it would probably produce enough gas to run your three gen sets if you were able to run from one to the other making air/fuel adjustments which can change depending on how well your feed stock is being processed and fed within the gasifier. Pretty large learning curve on any of this. The only way to learn is by doing. These guys giving you this advise didn’t learn it in all in a book or on the web. What they are revealing is hard learned lessons from many years of trial and error.
yea Sean I know all about biochar.i already use it,mainly to lower the acidity of my compost.how big of a generator can it be to run on a charcoal gasifier? And is your name really Sean O’Malley? Lol
Tom I’ve got a cheap ass harbor freight welder that I’ve used like 10 times.wouldnt be to pretty but I could get it done.i was curious if inside the hearth would melt the welds,I was gonna try and keep welds away from the combustion area.
Then you have 90% of what you need already. This is a 1991 lumina minivan, which used the GM 3.1L. I would say that could get you pretty close to what you need with a genhead on it.
Okay, lets think about this. On Wood my gasifer in the Dakota gets 1.3 pounds of wood per mile. Now charcoal looses half of its energy when all the tars are baked away in the process of making charcoal maybe more depending on what kind of wood and how it is done, this is the quality of the charcoal.
Lets just say you will need 2 pounds of charcoal to go 1 mile because you can get a little H2 back by using water vapor. Now I want to go 200 miles round trip. So that is 400 hundred pound of charcoal. But how much bulk is that to carry in the vehicle. If I now am pulling a trailer my mileage just dropped some more. May it is 3 pounds to 1 mile. And now I will be hybrid driving a lot more using Dino fuel. The plus side is this …
I do not have to worry about tars any more and I can use engines with plastic intakes, carburetor, EFI, . So the real question is this, can you haul enough charcoal to make the round trip. @KristijanL, @k_vanlooken, and others have proven it can done so have the wood gasifer people have proven it can be done, and both can walk away and do other things with automation or with out. It is how good of a gasifer builder are you and how good of a operater are you when it comes to gasification. Hack some people can’t even run a modern wood stove correctly with dry wood. Wet wood forget it but it can be done if you now how to do it correctly.
OKAY Just for Sh**s and giggles I would love to run my 1976 25 ft. Dodge Motor Home with a Onan 4.0 kw Genset and a 440 cu. In. Engine that will easily roll up to 90 mph. down the highway and climb up hills at highway speeds, ALL ON charcoal gas and hybrid driving. Why because it get 8 miles to a gallon of gas. And if I pull the boat it stills gets about 8 miles to a gallon of gas. It was built when the highway speeds were reduced in the US and in Canada. This Dodge was built in Canada. The 440 cu. in. engines are strong. And the gearing is lower.
Okay call me crazy… I will just take it has a complaint anyways. But I really would like to do this. And then use the charcoal gasifer for heating the motor home with the genset and electric heating. And also charging the batteries and cooking with charcoal gas outside on my gas stove, all at the same time. Saving monies on buying LP gas. I might build some tiki torches to burn too for lighting.
Just like they did in Seattle from 1909 to 1956, but on a much smaller scale.
Bob
Good morning Mr. Bob .
Did you mean 1.3 miles per pound of wood ?
There is the deception of charcoal. Charcoal pr lb has more BTU energy than raw wood does pr lb. Charcoal is 9600 btu per lb raw wood is 8600.
When you produce charcoal yes you lose some energy making it. You also lose energy producing chips or chunks and then also energy in drying. If say you used a gasifier to power the equipment to chip the fuel, how much are going to " burn" in your gasifier to produce those chips?" I cant speak for chunking yet but as for chipping I have a good idea and the energy involved to produce chips is about the same as producing charcoal. There is not that much loss if any.
Then going from raw fuels to charcoal. The M-1 Ute has a much smaller hopper than the old Raw Fuel M-2 / 4 Utility machines. Plus fuel does not fully consume to the depth of what those old machines did. It does not fall short by very much and its probably closer to half the capacity of the wood machines.
Oops, yes Wayne I said it backwards, I mean 1.3 miles per 1 pound of wood. Thanks for the correction. Even with old dryed out gray barn wood I can get 1 mile per pound of wood.
Bob
Here is a small woodgas generator. It is cross draft, so higher tar, but it is a no-weld design.
I was looking forward to opinion on the wood gasifier to run a gasoline engine. I have heard of running engines on just gas fumes, it does work. However, I learned in college that fuel is also a lubricant for pistons. This means to me that running on fumes or worse, wood, there would be no lubrication. This thread turned out really informative for me. Thanks, everyone.
Hello AnnieC, welcome to the DOW.
Only a few engine fuels contribute to cylinder walls lubrication. Diesel and some kerosene’s.
Most liquid fuels like gasoline and alcohols actually wash piston distributed oil off of the cylinder walls.
Dry gaseous fuels like methane, propane, woodgas have little effect on the cylinder walls.
An internal combustion engines cylinder walls are lubricated by crankcase oil splashing up directly onto the lower cylinder walls some.
But also oil splashed up (or newer engines - intentional pressure jet spray) of oil up, onto the inside of the piston.
This oil then is distributed out by the lower oil control rings. With the excess scraped off, piston going downward.
Most important to get the engine oil warmed up and then good splash/spray moving/distributing as quickly as possible for minimum internal engine wearing. Heating expanding piston in bore helps to reduce cold running wear too.
Woodgas, or charcoal gas the danger to the engine would be the fuel gasses (NOT fumes; and never smoke) carrying in mineral ash from the gasification processes.
These are supposed to be removed by cyclone centrifuging; settling chambers; and filtration systems.
These opinions are based on 55 years of in the field, repairing and rebuilding of IC piston engines.
Regards
Steve Unruh