LOL you are in good company. Like I was saying I spent a long time avoiding charcoal 8 years. Im not one that does this on the weekends or delves into a build once a month. I do this every single day of my life 24/7 365 days a year. Its how I put food on the table.
Note to all members, when new members want to run small engines. We need to put the breaks on wood fuel builds. Get these guys starting out with the SimpleFire first. Get them learning and grasping the technologies on this first. This way they are not wasting thier time and money and like all of us trying to re invent these things that they have never built. Trying to solve problems they forsee but are not really there for example.
Once you have built a charcoal gasifier or simplefire you will then get some experience and will learn the processes as you go. This is the foundation you must learn first. Then you build from this foundation and can revisit building a wood fueled system later if you desire. Chances are you are going to find charcoal is not as hard as you thought and is actually more viable for daily fuel production.
That’s right. I would say wood is turned fully into charcoal already - at or slightly below - nozzle level. The glowing charbed below then converts steam and CO2 into burnable gasses. It also acts as a safety net to burn any trace amounts of tary vapour. That’s why the restriction is needed - to keep the velocity and heat up.
Wether you choose wood or char for your fuel it’s all about trail and error. Even a thousand words couldn’t teach a person how ride a bicycle. It’s the same with gasification. But, as soon as you get the hang of it, it’s relatively easy.
During WW2 over a million vehicles were converted to woodgas in Europe. Almost 10% of them in Sweden. Most people used charcoal to start with, but things evolved more and more towards wood gasifiers. Raw wood was considered more available, cleaner and easier to handle.
Still, people were happy when the war was over and liquid fuel was available again. Only a few kept driving on wood. A wild guess is it was our type of people - those who maybe built there own gasifiers and had a bit more understanding of the process and therefore experienced a smoother ride - compared to avarage people with store bought gasifiers.
Makes sense. If I’m lucky i might just get this thing working good enough for my current needs. Like I said earlier, not looking for everyday operation (yet ), just something that I can tinker around with and get a few hours of generator runtime.
Also I am an mechanical engineer and know my way around engines. So I will gladly clean tar from the valvetrain and combustion chamber once or twice a month in compensation for my sloppy gasifier build. I decided today that I will drop a 60mm restriction into the the thing right from the start, so this should hopefully reduce the tar amount by a bit.
We’ll see how the first testflare goes in a couple days. I will keep you updated.
Gladly? I doubt it
You shouldn’t need to. What happens if you’ve made tary gas is the intake valves can stick to their seats when the engine cools down. First sign is the throttle will not move as freely as it should. If ever in doubt, try turn the engine some by hand before you start to crank up. If it’s stuck - heat is the key. On a car, plugging in the block heater is usually enough to loosen it up.
Lets just hope it doesn’t happen. I’ve been driving about 10 000 km a year on wood for the past eight years. I’ve been cleaning the throttlebodies quite often but never experienced a stuck valve.
Just one more thing - I guess you already know, but - remember to prefill with plenty of white ash around the restriction and the rest of the firetube with charcoal, sized between peas and pop-corn, all the way well above the nozzles. Never ever start a brand new gasifier on wood only.
Daniel,
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone mention FEMA in this thread, but the last illustration you posted resembles a FEMA gasifier to me–known as a tar producer–proceed with caution!
Daniel,
If you do decide to try the SimpleFire, I invite you to check out my thread: Toyota Corolla Charcoal Vehicle Gasifier Project. You might scroll to the end and print out a copy of the most recent brochure.
Car engines and larger engines in general can tollerate some tar as the valve train is much more tollerant. Thicker rocker arms, stiffer springs, presurized oil systems, larger diameter push rods etc. Todays modern single cylinder engines are nearly impossible to wood gas. They cant tollerate very much tar if any at all espicially with a splash type oil system. Plus they are not built sloppy like the old days.
Oh, trust me I know wayy to much about this haha… What i didn’t tell you is thatI have put quite a few hours on a generator with my crappy prototype i made a couple years ago( documented earlier in this thread).I’ve ran the generator a good while on that hunk of junk, and to make things worse, on big chunks of straight pinewood against all suggestions. It did tar it up of course, to the point of the intake valve sticking within two hours of runtime, or first cooldown. I cleaned it multiple times back then and just put it back together for another run. This was part of my regular maintenance LOL.
Must say im amazed at how much crap would collect in the valvetrain of that thing before it even missed a beat
What im trying to say is that im not afraid to let a little tar through every now and then…
I do have a sealed lid on this thing though, and the air is introduced only through the nozzles at the hearth… So as far as my understanding goes, this shouldn’t produce quite as much tar as the fema does
I had to read back and for some reason it seems I completely missed this thread back then. Don’t know how that happened. Good to know what page you’re on.
You mentioned your mother tounge is Swedish, but you live in Finland. Do you live on the Swedish speaking coast-line or did you move from here?
I am in JO corner . I have been driving wood gasifiers for over 20 years and an estimated half million miles . At the moment I can’t think of anything I would do differently if I built another.
Caution A good wood gasifier will cause tires to wear
This has been 2 autumns in a row now, still not sure what the problem is.
This year I haven’t touched anything around the throttle or the nozzles, (before I cleaned and put new charcoal in there) I think that after driving for a while the ash seals so that the tar can’t slip past the throttle.
Congrats on getting that to work! You are making me want a tracked machine!
I just have to say it you Swedish folks are phenomenal!! I can’t believe how good you guys are with wood. It is like magic and you are one with the forest. I have heard of trees communicating with each other. but I never dreamed you folks could teach a bag of wood chunks to drive!!
Hi Daniel, a good option is to be able to run the engine on gasoline, about 5 minutes before shut-down, gasoline, in a hot engine, and maybe some e85 mixed in, flushes away some of the tars.
(Whish i had built it that way on my first builds)
Just to “torture” myself some, i’ve put some stuff in a pile, for a future mini wood-gasifier, i will try cutting twigs in pellet-size, to run it.
But this will start as earliest next spring.
Daniel you said you’d used conifer wood? Yes? Or maybe that was JanA.?
The important point all of the use pre-made wood charcoal Black-Handers gloss over is that for engine fuel grade wood charcoal you need to process and grind down to the needed particle sizing you must use a hardwood tree. Conifer stem wood charcoaled is fragile and will crumble to unusable char powder dust.
The in woodgas system conifer chars made is not mechanically handled and disturbed. Used up as made in place.
Yeah. Yeah. For us in predominantly confer wood forests just hippy-skippy then right past the majority of the trees and their wood and seek out the rare native hard woods to feed your charcoal system.
NOT going to happen here PNW westside of my state by me, and others here. Our energy trees are native conifers.
It’s not that they lie; or even intend to deceive. They live in predominately hardwood trees areas. They cannot, and will not ever understand those of us who do not. They lack flexibility in imagination when talking on a world wide Do-It-Yourself-for-Yourself forum.
Steve Unruh
I think you are missing our point. To learn the technology this is where you start, you learn the foundations, you get to experience what a reliable working system should be. You build this first its simple and can done in day without going broke or investing a ton of time into. Then let the ideas flow.
Softwood charcoal works just fine. Its not as good as hardwood fuels but its certianly usable for charcoal fuel. Especially the conifires you have, those trees are litterally where most of our building materials come from. Ive converted tons of waste building materials into charcoal. I litterally had a pallet company giving truck loads of it away daily and it all was used for heating and converting to engine fuel charccoal.
Here have been my experiences gasifing for engine grade fuels using different woods.
First the differences in characteristics begins with a softwood versus hardwoods.
Then a bigger differences between using a raw, as cut was live wood, versus a “dead” wood.
Live/raw wood is sap filled. Great for sawing and shearing. Difficult for immediate planing and smoothing-sanding.
Gasifing the saps wet or dried gives tarring problems yes but rewards with a higher energy content by volume and weight when to H2, CO and CH4 fuel gasses converted.
Now soft woods or hardwoods made “dead” stabilized . . .
forced kiln dried-cooked . . .
years aged in-place . . . insides a building . . . out in the weather . . .
changes gasifing it significantly.
So on the one hand this being a “first gasifier attempt topic” relevant to advise a person to go easy charcoal gasifer as a beginners machine.
But just say you actually have made the choice to truly live Rural. Your best available on-hands source for gasifer fuel is trees grown on your own property. Not for you Urban stabilized pallet woods scrounging. Buildings demo wood. Urban housing construction end cuts stabilized woods.
True Rural living you will want to take the longer learning pathway approach to using a direct fed raw wood fueled gasifier.
What Wayne Kieth did.
What JanA., J.O., Tone and others have done.
Me.
Just because most-other’s cannot, will not, do raw wood gasifying does not mean no one else can. That it is impossible.
Being the exception; done enough times, is what makes a person exceptional.
The real myth, lead-astray-lie we need to keep killing back here on the DOW is the “all bio-mass can be gasified”. And that is literal crap talking. MDF. Particle board. Fiberboard. Even OSB are crap gasifier fuel stocks.They will not conversions deep down do gasses exchanging. Only surface react. Will not char good. Far too high of nasty smoky combusting binding resins.
Steve Unruh
), just something that I can tinker around with and get a few hours of generator runtime.
