Hi folks,
Excellent question and I’ll try to clear up any ambiguity, along with some backstory.
For some reason, woodgas folks have a tendency to guard jealously their million-dollar ideas. When I got into this around 2010, you couldn’t talk about certain systems openly, there was a lot of bad blood and secrets, accusations of copying, etc. I know of a half-dozen systems like this. (I’ve since learned most of the secrets and laughed.) The only one actually driving around however was Wayne Keith.
When I first went to visit Wayne in 2011, he let me crawl all over his truck, looking at his control systems, plumbing, condensate tanks, valves, etc. I watched him light it, and looked in the hopper. He showed me exactly how he drove the truck, and even let me drive it. At that time, he hadn’t released any info about the internals of the gasifier, which to be fair, are pretty well hidden from external view. I was actually planning to take the lessons learned and apply them to my own gasifier, which wasn’t nearly as well built or reliable… Then I got a call from Wayne in January 2012, and this site was born.
Wayne had the only system worth “stealing”, and he decided to let everyone in on it.
We’ve always followed that same guideline for what is and isn’t kept hidden about the Wayne Keith system (WK for short). Anything you can see, is free. External systems like cooling tubes etc, are not specific to Wayne’s systems, even though he’s done a better job designing them than previous builders. But without the special hearth or “firetube” system you haven’t got a WK gasifier.
I think I can speak for both myself and Wayne here. We don’t consider the gasifier design intellectual property. Nor is it patented. The point of keeping it hidden and pay-for-access is to help support Wayne and myself, and this website. People buy in looking for the “secret sauce”, and the serious ones tend to stay as members of the community.
We printed a book too, because people like books. The website has way more information, it’s more up-to-date, detailed, and interactive (it’s hard to ask a book questions). But if you’re going to charge $50, people want something to hold in their hand. Real handy to take to the garage or fab shop. It’s a good book, we put about a year of effort into writing it. A second edition is probably overdue, but there’s no budget for that.
Do I think the cat is out of the bag? Probably. Somewhere, someone has re-posted our videos, digitized our book, and probably pirate-shared the whole thing. But they can’t steal the community of users, access to a community of actual DOers. That’s our true value as a website, the 150+ on call problem-solving thinkers, who can help you with your project. And, ironically, most of this is available for free. People receive help all the time on the public side, we only restrict discussions of Wayne’s gasifier internals.
Now, we have a lot of people like @Bobmac building new systems, improving designs, and keeping the process going. Is it still a “Wayne Keith” gasifier? Do we own all the improvements “you” made?
It’s the wrong way to look at it. You own your design. We’re not charging people for your improvements, just to have a look at Wayne’s internals. So, if you expose the WK internals, or your improved iteration of those internals, we keep that discussion on the Premium side. If you’re building a shiny cooling rack, or a new hopper design, that’s fine to show off publicly. Again, nobody’s going to take your external systems and wind up with a true WK gasifier, they need the hearth design.
If there’s enough interest, we could open things up completely. We just have to figure out how to pay for the site, perhaps donations, etc. The system as-is, does pay the light bill.
========================
The VAT tax implemented in 2015 is here:
Basically we cannot have a customer in the EU without crippling requirements for filing taxes in those countries. Our market there has (until recently) been pretty small, so I just excluded it.
What I usually tell EU folks… get someone stateside to pay for it, we’ll mail your book direct to you if you like - but it has to be a gift. You cannot be our customer.
It’s been a few years, and we do have some folks there now. I should revisit the situation and see if there’s a better solution.
@d100f this only affects EU, we’re glad to sell anywhere else including Australia. Order here.