Ouch. I feel like I put in a dime and got quarter results.
Let me clarify my own personal wood-for-power position.
As soon as augers, conveyors, mini-electronic processors are added to the the system I lose interest.
Because over the course of 50+ years in the working professional world, I experienced and saw time and time again once a system “lost” direct touch manual control, even if just a back-up then sooner versus later those ohh-Wow’ser systems were stopping. Not producing. Doing nothing. Waiting for a specialized Technologist to come and I’s and O’s sort it out. Or system down, not producing; waiting for a one-of-a-kind gear drive motor; motor power supply; relay; whatever; to be sourced and shipped in. And then once replaced the system had to be re-trained calibrated for the new replacement part.
The GEK’s are the perfect example.
I was a GEK supporter and even kit buyer back in the GEK I and GEK II beginning days.
I then searched out pre-existing GEK owners, got invited to operate thiers before I would welded up my first-of-its-kind stainless steel kit.
O.K., small. Really, really small.
O.K., horribly narrow stand up pipe legs . . . the least bump and they would fall over.
O.K. had some operating functional improvement changes that should be made like jacketing with a single master air-in, of the five individual air-in ports no longer requiring them to all be individually capped for shutting down.
Feed back from many, and these changes were made on the improved GEK III’s. Air jacket added. Wide spaced fin type “rocket legs” then.
But soon due to brainiac demands the III’s were changed to a no-more central settling down feed fuel hopper; but to a side feeding auger.
For crushed nuts shells and fruit pits. For manufactured wood and other materials very uniform sized fuel pellets.
NO LONGER CAPABLE OF SITE GROWN AND CUT UP RAW WOOD CHUNKS
I directly complained that the true Rural living who on their own properties growing tree and brush were being left behind. I was told that “Pepper’s” weren’t the people who were an interest to the Berkley California developers. Niether were the drive-on-wood folks.
The APL/GEK took a hard dive then into full electronics automation of all of the GEK’s operating functions. The GEK IV’s. And the GEK IV’s soon evolved into the Power Pallets.
More than once here on the DOW some poor Power Pallet buyer-owner has cried out for someone to source them a replacement failed APL proprietary electronic control board.
Ha! I move on to Victory Gasworks. Ben Peterson. My involvement was the insistence for using stainless steel. For all system to have manual override back up capabilties.
I do not apologize for my mid-20th Century attitudes. I was the polysilicon wafer disc edge grinder who hand ground the first 300 mm production proof prototypes on an old 1960’s made-in-california only 75-150 mm grinder bench that got our 1 billon dollar Fab plant approved for the additional 2 billion dollars to be able to 21st Century upgrade. Only three of eight Fab plants worldwide qualified. Working there for 7 years time and time again each department had to set aside failed tweekie robotics and push customers orders through each value-added steps; and then hands pushed roller carts deliverer to the next process. The optical visual tracking; then later magnetic tape following robotic delivery carts kept crashing destroying orders.
Same things I saw on milk cow dairies beginning working at 14 years old.
Same thing I saw in medium sized wood products mills later. In plywood mills an eight man manual lay-up table could outproduce a three man 150 foot long raised moving bed o lay-up machine. When you factored in the four hours shut down needing two-man cleaning up and resetting time.
I will make no apologies for my manual, humans celebrating insistent ways.
I can make blue flare gas any time I would wish using bulk raw wood:
Steve Unruh
