i have had the same problem sometimes when the gas was not clean enough… now with the additional filters works fine…
one thing but i must modyfie…the axle of the throttle in the gasoline carburettor stays very exact in the outer metall for not sucking additional air inside, what disturbs the gasoline air mix…
for wood-chargas it can stay a bit looser, i worked a bit on the axle with sand paper, and this works really fine, only for gasoline use it works not more well i think…
12 Likes
Well, months later, I’ve finally gotten everything completed and test ran the gasifier/generator. Got a quick good flare and good gas. I ran the generator for 2 1/2 hours and all seems good. Tomorrow I will open up the gasifier and see how much charcoal was used. I’ll also pull the nozzle and inspect.
I am still getting a bunch of water in the gas, I think mostly from the old charcoal in the gasifier that went through our wet winter here. I collected about 8 oz from the drain on the radiator, but a bunch still got past the filter and into the carb intake. I will have to see what happens with fresh charcoal.
I noticed that as the run progressed, the top of the gasifier got hotter and hotter as did the outlet, cyclone and radiator. The generator continued to run well. The top got hot enough to boil off water drops immediately. Just wondering if this is normal.
Now I have to decide if I want to try and make a closed loop cooling system. Mostly wanting to do this to keep corrosion down in the nozzle. I will have to see if I can get a thermal syphon going. I’m sure it will raise the temperature of the cooling water a lot, but probably not to the point it adversely affects the nozzle.
All in all, a good day. 
19 Likes
Neat!
Yes, l have noticed this phenomenom. Seems the fuel saturates with heat and then it has no way to go but outside. Was a huge problem for my in the trunk gasifier.
I do think updrafts arent realy ment for long runs. No matter what l did, even if l refueled, the temperature was still rising.
10 Likes
Thanks Kristijan for that confirmation. I was wondering if I might have had an air leak somewhere. With the previous vessel that had holes in the bottom I had the same heat issue only it appeared much sooner. I thought I had gotten everything sealed well with this gasifier.
I don’t have a direct issue with the heat as you did with the gasifier in the trunk of a car, but I do think the heat causes the water to get carried over into the gas. I wasn’t seeing water condense out of the radiator until well into the run. I guess if the top of the gasifier is hot, most of the fuel charge must also be at high temperature and the water/steam has to leave with the gas. But that means the charcoal left over from the run should be drier. I’ll have to see if I get the same amount of water out on the next run. If that is the case, it just means I need better storage of the charcoal I produce.
8 Likes
I took out the nozzle and it looks like there is no change, just a little ash on it but no obstruction of the air inlet hole. I burned about 6 inches of charcoal in the barrel over the 2 1/2 hours. There wasn’t any load on the generator, so that will be another test.
15 Likes
all perfect !!
gratulations !!!
from my experience, a little quantity of humidity in the gas helps filtering in way the filter medium gets a bit umid and the dust settles there more easy…
12 Likes
I ran the gasifier for 1 3/4 hours today. With a light load on the generator, the gasifier consumed about 5 inches of charcoal out of the 55 gallon drum. However, about 1 1/4 hours into the run, the generator sounded like it was struggling. Shaking the gasifier fixed the issue, but it required a shaking every 10 to 15 minutes thereafter. I think I will just have to keep the gasifier chock full as there was no problem with the first run. If the level at which this occurs is 16 inches down from the top (where I ended the run today), that means I should get about 6 hours of good running before needing attention if filled to the brim.
One good thing is that there was practically no water condensed out of the radiator this time. As I expected, most of the water was evaporated in the first run.
Another good day. Now on to building a charcoal retort - I need more charcoal. 
21 Likes
That’s the beauty of using 55 gallon barrels Marty. Easy to add height and volume to your hopper.
8 Likes
Yes Marty that is exactly how my 55 gallon gasifier works as well I get 5 hours run time pulling full power before it starts to run low and wants to stop .
Dave
9 Likes
Just finished my charcoal retort. I made it modular so I could handle the pieces alone.
Here is the charcoal canister loaded up:
Assembled and burning:
It burned for a few hours but the results were not good. The major error is that I left the loading door open and there was way too much excess air. This cooled the combustion products. The wood was barely charred.
I burned again. This time I left the loading door open just a crack and I packed the area between the charcoal chamber and the outer drum with some firewood. The outer drums got a lot hotter this time. The following video shows the off gassing from the charcoal. It started as steam and then became a burning flare.
The results:
So in the end I got a bag of charcoal that weighed about 24 pounds and filled about 12 inches of the 55 gallon drum.
I am pleased with the quality of the charcoal. It seems harder than when I made the last bunch in an open top barrel. Also there is no ash to deal with and much less dust.
I did another burn today. The time line is about 1 hour to steam coming off the charcoal chamber, 1 1/2 hour to wood gas igniting, 3 1/2 hours to a small and intermittent flare, and capping the retort at 4 1/4 hours. At 4 1/2 hours I took off the barrels and plugged the bottom hole in the chamber. 15 minutes later, the retort is still hot, but cool enough to handle. If I had a metal barrel with a lid, I could dump the charcoal in it and start up another load in the retort, and get two loads in a day.
Because the charcoal is harder, I think I may have to work on my crusher some more. Time to go metal.
13 Likes
Way to go! That’s some fine barbecue grade charcoal, too!
I still need to fix my Hookway sort of retort. I was thinking of using one of my big oil tanks that I’ve already cut into as my burn chamber, since my retort is a 55 gallon drum.
I may even remove the internal chimney and just place some off gas ports on the bottom like you did with that tank. More room for wood.
9 Likes
I think you have a good idea there Cody. I have seen 55 gallon drums in an old oil tank retorts. Nice thing is that the drum is horizontal and easier to load and unload than my vertical design. I would love to make one like that, but good luck trying to find an oil tank in Chile. 
9 Likes
Looking great!
Indeed, a retort produces denser, harder charcoal. Allinall better quality thsin a TLUD.
11 Likes
Does the volume shrink much in a retort or do you get almost as much (volume wise) as you initially put in?
I end up with maybe 1/4 the amount I start with just burning it until it all turns to coals and then shovel them into an air tight barrel to cool which is working OK but the retort method looks like it would work better if the wood was already close to engine grade size. When I tried that with my method I ended up with mostly biochar.
Of course, I mostly start with as long of pieces as I can to avoid so much cutting but getting almost engine grade sized charcoal without all the mess and dust would be nice.
3 Likes
From the pictures you can see that the top of the load went from a couple of inches above the tank top to a few inches below. I stuffed the wood in so that it was quite tight, but after firing it was loose - so the load shrank in both length and width. But nothing like the 1/4 you say you got. Of course you have to account for the wood I used to heat the retort when comparing to your method. It is significant. I do plan on doing a run where I weigh everything and determine the amount of wood used to heat the retort versus that turned to charcoal.
Regarding engine size charcoal - I find it much easier to reduce charcoal to that size rather than wood. That was one of the reasons I built a charcoal gasifier. Even before I built a crusher, I felt it was still easier to manually crush the charcoal rather than cut the wood to size first. Unless you have a supply of already small pieces, I would just use larger pieces of wood. But yes, if you use small pieces of wood, they will shrink just slightly in size going to charcoal.
7 Likes
Thanks Marty.
This is where I got the idea to “not grind” the charcoal.
I don’t want to cut all the pieces and end up with 3/4 of it just burning away. Might not be a big deal if I had a chunker but I might be willing to cut a bucket of small pieces and use other wood to fire the retort.
Another use I could see with the retort would be if making BBQ charcoal using special woods and fire it with other woods. I suppose even making the charcoal from hardwood and firing it with softwood could get better quality engine fuel.
Your charcoal did look a lot nicer than mine does.
6 Likes
Good thing I’m dumb and lazy because you guys make this seem a lot more complicated than how I make it and I may have given up early if I had to work that hard. I did cook up some of the left overs I had from cutting up chunks for Jacob North and I liked it but not nearly enough to do it again.
8 Likes
Tom, I just found one of your videos. I agree that making charcoal doesn’t need to be as complicated as some of us try to make it but that retort charcoal did look nice.
I was trying to find your method of making charcoal. Is the only air inlet through the pipe where you hook your blower? Do you have to run the blower a little bit after each new wood addition to keep it from smoking?
I can’t quite figure out how your grinder works. I’m guessing it forces any bigger chunks against the channel (flat plate) and the half pipe piece ends up very close to the plate as it rotates. What determines the largest size? Hard to tell from the picture on the video but it looks like the half round piece has more than a 1/2 inch gap. *** EDIT - The picture I was looking at wasn’t welded yet ***
My grinder (similar to Gary Gilmore’s) doesn’t take a lot of power and I’ve been running it with a cordless drill but a hand crank like yours has would probably be good enough and not have to worry about how much charge the battery has or if the carbon dust was going to mess up the drill. It’s probably slower than yours but doesn’t take a long time to fill a bucket.
My usual method of making charcoal is somewhat a TLUD but sometimes I add more wood as it burns. Usually this results in smoke at least for a while until it gets burning good again.
I sometimes blow air into it to get it burning better but I have more than one air hole at the base of the water heater tank. Mostly I just let it smoke and it clears back up after a few minutes but less smoke would be better.
8 Likes
The video with the grinder was poorly shot Brian but basically the cylinder just sits inside a J made from a half pipe welded to a plate. The cylinder just has four half inch bars welded to it. At that time I was hoping to make everything as simple as possible to induce some homesteading people I am involved with to try working with wood gas but that never happened. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. I still use the grinder because it does what I need it to without having to make it more elaborate. I don’t really have to worry about smoke and yes my barrel smokes quite a bit at start up and some when loading in new wood. I have since gone to a TLUD and for branches I have found that Chuck Whitlock’s tilted barrel design works fairly smoke free. Because of how I run my wood heater for the house I get quite a bit of char out of that as well during the heating seasons.
11 Likes
Probably the wery best method for making engine grade charcoal on a small scale is the bathtub or tilt barrel method. Light a fire on the bottom and just top up with twigs and branches untill the barrel or bathtub is full. If the twigs are reasonably dry you can fill half a 55gal barrel in a hour of burning. Requires no grinding usualy too, just dust sifting.
16 Likes