That looks really good Dean.
I am glad that pwm is working good for you. I’ve got a very cheap controller like yours. Hopefully I can get it wired up and get the same results.
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Hi Dean, you have made a great product, but time will tell how well it converts wood to gas, if there will be any problems with sticking wood pieces, if there will be enough fine charcoal underneath, if there will be a compacted area underneath, or if there will be a void. Anyway, you have the possibility to control this and adjust the amount of air below so that there will be a fairly light area during operation. It will also be interesting to monitor the operation of the unloaded engine, whether it will be able to idle for a long time and how quickly it will recover when the need increases…
Everything looks great.
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Congrats, bud! Does your truck have the plastic intake plenum or a metal one?
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It has the plastic one so far.
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Today I cleaned out the ashes and it was full and way to big of charcoal, at least 1/2 to 3/4 in pieces, so I looked and my grate slid down to about 2in below reduction tube. I initially had it set to about 3/4 in but it slid down , only had set screws, so I set it back to 3/4 or so thru the ash clean out and give it a 7018 set screw. I still can adjust it up or down easy so I’ll give it a try and see if it will be spilling less and be Easier on wood.
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Hey Bronlin, because pwm work on ground i searched for the power and ground on this gmc, it just so happened the ground came out of wiring harness and bolted to frame on cab mount under drivers side door, and the power is a grey wire in that harness, once I figured it out wasn’t to bad, just used six prong three way toggle switch to have ground and power and it worked.
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Ran the gasifier for over an hour today , put over 30 miles on it while running straight wood gas and with hybrid. I have an aem wideband afr and it’s pretty accurate and I am impressed how the trucks computer quickly adjusted in this gmc with the playing around I did. I also put about 10 miles on in straight wood gas then let it idle for 5 min , the temp out of heat exchanger cooled down to about 350 F and only pulls about 1 inches on nanometer while idling, when I went to leave it stumbled so I adj air , didn’t stall but was gutless then about 30 seconds later it got better and adjusted and went for another drive, does this sound normal? Stopping at stop signs and taking off it doesn’t hesitate any so just wondering if this is normal?
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The wood I have been using is tamarack ( larch) it’s high in btu but it is a soft wood, and moisture with meter is 13%, with high humidity I don’t think I can get much under this unless I force dry it.After this run I got nearly 2 gallons of water out of it in hopper and rails, I know a lot of moisture is going thru engine, gonna try some birch and maybe some poplar, not many hardwood species around here. I think I’m gonna add a cyclone to it cause when i pulled hard on it playing around (prob shouldn’t do this ) I bottomed out my nanometer, but that was revving pretty high I got some small charcoal in my cooling rack. Need to do some changes to gasifier and maybe drive accordingly. Part of the 75%.
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You make this sound easy Dean 
you doing great.
13% is premium. I wuldnt worry one bit about it. The gasifier will take care of the moisture.
Fuel size does play a role too thugh, as do species. Highway fuel vs idling around fuel might be different, you will have to experiment.
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I think the next item on your agenda should be a throttle tensioner to adjust your idle on the fly.
Even with my fully electronic throttle, I noticed the standard method would work. You could get fancy and use a PTO cable but Wayne uses a regular cable and a turn screw to pull the accelerator pedal up.
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Yes , The best idle adjustment I have found is a simple piece of plastic hay twin.
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Ya fly by wire is not the handiest to hook stuff on , so I made a little frame with a nut welded in it that bolted over gas pedal arm and used a piece of fine tread all thread that I had to push on it and installed yesterday before I went for a ride, seems to work ok , kind of touchy, don’t have to turn much to get rpm.
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A little charcoal in the cooling rails will not be a problem. I get charcoal in mine all the time and into the lower condensation tank too. But thats as far as it goes. I just flush it out when cleaning my cooling tubes with water and then out the drain of the tank with a spray hose nozzle.
Great job on your successful DOW adventures.
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We had couple weeks of minus 30+c and finally warmed up to -15 so I went for a ride today, I had some beaver fell birch that was wet so I dried it on wood stove and mixed it with tamarack and give it a try, seemed to work good, and tomorrow I’ll clean out ash and see how much charcoal I slipped. Put about 40 miles on it and did some hybrid driving, this truck seems to adjust quite fast while closing off air, if you didn’t have a pwm I think it would adj
down enough to just shut off pump.
A couple grandkids sitting in truck
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Thanks for the pics and video Dean … You make us all smile 
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Dean greetings, I don’t think there’s any need to praise your work, because “a good product praises itself”,…
I’m glad that your system is working well, well, as you wrote somewhere when you were installing the air intake nozzles, that way you leave yourself the possibility to “tune” the operation, … Mr. Wayne has a saying: “if I have wood, I will traveled” , this also applies to you.
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Thanks Tone, yes I have adjustments I could do. Right now my 10 top nozzles are about 7/16 (11mm) and my 5 lower ones are about 5/16(8mm) and my restriction is 6 inches so I could open it up some, but right know it pulls about 10 to 15 inches cruising at 90kmh so I’m gonna leave it for a while. Also I wasn’t happy with how much charcoal was slipping by, the previous trip I burned about 25 gallons of wood chunks and the ash pit was just about full , pulled 5 or 6 gallons of ash and char out, it wasn’t big stuff just lots. Then I moved the grate up another 1/4 inch to about half inch from restriction and burned about the same amount and today I cleaned it and only got 1 gallon, made me happy. But adding birch and maybe driving a bit easier and maybe char bed is settling in also had something to do with it.
This is a pic of my char after sifting thru 1/4 inch screen,it is very brittle it crushes to powder if you squeeze it between your fingers.
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Dean I’d say 6" is a good sweet spot, maybe 6.25" at most. As long as you don’t feel too much lag in power I’d say leave the restriction as it is. Takes a while for the char bed to fully break in, even with exercising it.
I noticed in your video you managed to pull 100km/h, that’s awesome. Is that the average highway speed around there?
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Ya our highways here are 100kmh and gravel or grid roads are 80kmh.
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Dean, where do you measure the vacuum?
I still haven’t understood what I should be on that is normal, after those years of wood.
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