Hey. Guess what? I got the unofficial “most unique car” recognition in the car show by the local newspaper. Here is the article from last week’s paper:
Oxford-Ledger-Car-Show-Article11-12-20.pdf (2.1 MB)
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Congratulations Steve! 
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Well done Steve best in show as far as i am concerned as well .
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Good job Steve. I’m glad your persistence has paid off. Maybe not with money, but you have to feel good about the accomplishment. Keep sucking those lemons and thanks for sharing.
Gary in PA
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Thanks for the article Steve .
We all are proud of you 
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Congratulations it looks like you are making a mark in gasification in the area where you live.
Bob
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Thanks JO, Dave, Gary, Wayne and Bob.
Bob, curiosity, yes, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem anyone wants to join the less than “one in a million” who DOW.
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That is a good thing. Why? Be cause if everyone wanted to start to do DOW. I am sure the government would figure a way to tax the DOW drivers with mileage tax or you are actually helping the environment tax so it would not be worth doing. The cost of building and maintaining a wood or charcoal gasifer is enough to pay out for the person who built it to bare. In my tree hugging State I do not show my truck off, I try to keep a low profile while DOW. I like it that most of the people do not know what my truck is when driving down the road.
My next truck you will not be able from the out side tell if it is a wood gasifer truck, that includes DOW people. I love your trunk lid up design. It looks like you are hauling something large in the trunk. Put some fake tie downs holding the gasifer in the trunk and you are in the stealth mode.
Bob
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Congratulations Steve!!
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Way to go!!!
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Thanks, Eddy and Jakob. This was not exactly an award. But I’ll take what I can get. I discovered today that a daily paper in the next town picked up the story with photo as well.
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Hi Steve, you are becaming famous!!
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We should reward clever people with clean ideas. But we live in a society of fossil fuel junkies. We live in a world that rationalizes and subsidizes the growing of corn to turn into a gasoline adjunct…
Burning food in a world with far too many empty bellies!!!
I am sure if that money was out to rational uses like DOW we could put millions of carbon reactors online with far less consequences for the health and welfare of both people and the planet.
And I bet it would save a hell of a lot of money as a by-product.
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I agree, empty bellies are bad. But did you know that only ~5% of North America’s food growing capacity is used. The San Joaquin valley could feed the entire US. There are several midwest states that could do it too. We DON’T have a food shortage. We have a distribution problem. Read: greedy and power hungry people create problems so food doesn’t go where its supposed to.
Rindert
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5% of all that is a huge number. But its the burning part that really bothers me the most. What if we used that 5% and planted Copice willow and mixed that with coal to reduce emissions and generate cleaner electricity. I am sure we could get a much better return on investment and farmers could use marginal land for a fuel crop…
The willow thing ( or birch, aspen, all kinds of things different regions ) Doug William put that idea in my head 20 years ago and I still think its a genius solution for gasifiers and ground up and mixed with coal too.
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Hi Wallace,
I don’t think we even need to plant anything and wait for it to grow. I suppose you you are aware that vast stretches of Australia, Siberia, and the American west were consumed in wild fires? What if 5% of all that had been converted to charcoal and stored for future use as fuel? I think at some point property insurance companies (a powerful stakeholder) are going to step in and start requiring townships to control wildfires… How exactly it will be done I’m not sure. But the potential is there to convert a lot of biomass to fuel. Perhaps, folks like the ones on this forum could be part of it.
Rindert
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The beauty of it is this, all you need to store it is ground space. All over the dry and wet farm lands of the USA we pile up wheat on the ground to store it before shipping it out to the world.
Charcoal could be stored the same way and a lot longer. Just covered it so the wind will not blow it all away and store it in many separated piles not close together.
In the Central and Eastern part of Washington State we have heavily over grown forests that are dying out because of the Pine Boring Beatles infestation. Cut the dead trees down and due a control charcoal making burn in the fall/winter. Leave the pile right there. A new fuel supply for the future to use when needed. (Boy the oil companies are not going to like this.)
Some of the DOW members are all ready doing this. Now that I know it does not matter if the charcoal gets wet, it makes for storing charcoal a lot easier for me. Just store it on the ground and cover it up. Just remove the ash before storing it.
Store it in lump from for cooking and grind it later and screen it for gasification fuel.
Bob
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Huge forest here in Washington are very poorly managed (thanks governor dimsly) we have bad wildfires every year destroying thousands of acres of prime timber, that the gooberment won’t let be harvested, or is owned by offshore land barron’s that don’t do anything with it but sell hunting permits and occasionally firewood permits. A simple drive across my hunting grounds over the cascade crest trail you will see thousands of acres of burn standing timber, standing charcoal. Prime for many uses and not allowed to be touched. Forestry management is critical to overall health of the forest but fires arnt all bad. Makes for some long distance shooting and hunting, fresh greens popping up in the burn attracts back the wildlife to the area, some very fertile soils that produce some of the best morel and chanterelle mushrooms I have seen. If only I could harvest the unused fuel source. But on a firewood permit you can’t take dead standing, only on the ground within 50ft of a maintained road. So the firewoods gets picked pretty quickly. But with this new woodgas hobby options just keep opening up…
I reminisce on the days of controlled burns, thinning practices for better timber, and undergrowth reduction
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I think the problem is bigger and much more fundamental. Cities aren’t sustainable. That’s the heart of the distribution problem and concentrated waste problems. And multi generation urbanized people are basically helpless souls, they have no hand in their food production and mostly don’t care, and few that do have no skills.
In my opinion modern cities were developed / grown to serve the needs of big business and all of that predicated on abundant cheap FF. Never been an easier way to live, but take away the FF, and the people can’t go back, going to be ugly.
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Even since ancient times some people have liked to live in cities. It was not a decision of a few rich people.
Rindert
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