Howdy,
I’m with Sean and Arvid on this one… Would like to see a Woodgas optimized engine. Cam profile and timing should make a considerable improvement. If it runs on Gasoline good enough to get home in the event of Gasser issue. That would be fine with me. is anyone actively pursuing this?
HWWT
TerryL
Mike, yes I am continuing on my S10.
Sean, how many #s of boost were you giving the 318 when it started dropping cylinders? At least, no holes in the pan!!
I bought my woodgas test mule before finding out WK’s encouragement to get a big engine. It’s a '95 F-150 with the good old 300 six engine. A few weeks ago, I needed some parts and picked up a “spare” '93 model with a bad 300 engine. I plan to rebuild that engine specifically for woodgas and 100% ethanol… increased timing and possibly a different cam. Hopefully within the next few months, I can save up enough money!
By the way, the machine shop I use is a full race shop with an engine dyno. They are really interested in R&D. I may be able to get some dyno numbers on woodgas.
Todd, Paul Halvorson just moved his gasifier to a ford with the 300. His gasifer had an internal melt down but hopefully he will get it repaired soon and will start reporting again. I am curious as to how that engine will perform. I would expect it to do just fine. My full sized 4WD chevy is 262 CI or so and does fine on woodgas … Mike
Hey folks, I am new in this forum, but I have had own woodgas cars over 10 years. I have made some experiments with turbochargers in my woodgas-cars. I have this small vw pickup with only 110cid engine.
With supercharger it is quite simple. Everthing works just like with gasoline. But with turbocharger you have to make some changes. First of all your gasifier with filters and coolers ect. must be good (big) enough to give good and clean gas with low restrictions. With full load the hole systems underpressure can not be higher than 50 cm H2O with out turbocharger. Becouse of that underpressure in gasline ( even if it can be quite low) you must have a turbo whitch has carbon seal in the compressor side, othervice it will leak oil.
Woodgas have less energy compared to gasoline as we know. That is why exhaustgases will have lover temerature and flow. It means that we have to down size the turbiside of our turbocharger.
When these point have been taken care of, it will work great. I have driven several thousand miles with turbocharger in my woodgas car. I had only 0,5bar overpressure, but it rised my top speed from 62mph to 75 mph. I think it´s quite good for only 110cid engine.
Now I am working on a bigger gasifier and 122 cid engine with little modified turbocharger and new selfmade exhaust manifold. I am hoping to reach over 80 mph this time.
1 Like
Good Morning Mr. Vesa and welcome aboard sir.
If anyone has been involved with woodgas for a while they recognize your name right off.
Thanks for all you have done to promote our common interest in woodgas.
Wayne
1 Like
Good Evening Mr. Wayne. Sorry to dissapoint you, but you must be thinking my namesake Vesa Mikonen. He has written the book. I have not. But of course we know and see eatch other and so on.
I think we still have some couple more woodgas cars in Finland than you guys in US, but I think that situation is going to change quite soon.
Hi Vesa, Thanks for the tips. I have seen a copy of your book for a few minutes around 4 years ago when I met with TJ in Galena, Illinois. Your book is not available in our local library :o) Check out Wayne’s design. He has such a large oxidation area that he can gasify probably 4 times the wood in the same space that we do with the classic Imbert type nozzles. Then when it is not pulling hard, it drifts back into a semi Imbert mode with a huge char bed below to reduce things. His unit requires quite a bit of heat transfer to survive but he can throw wet wood in the hopper and it cooks the water out on the way down. I’d love to see it in stainless steel as you have been doing. My last conversion was a 2.2 liter 1997 cavalier with the USA OBD2 system in it. It ran like a dream till my wife blew the transmission in it. It is still buried in ice and my last trailer is also stuck in ice. That car had no trouble doing 70 mph pulling the trailer on the flat. It was never meant to pull a trailer and the bumper started to rot and fall off so I had to weld extra rods in etc etc etc … I think it converts to 134 cubic inches. I bought a Chevy S-10 truck a couple of weeks ago which also has a 2.2 liter in it and a 5 speed manual transmission that I plan to use with the trailer. I am slowly waiting for spring so I can get to seriously working on it. I was under it this morning to check the transmission fluid but I have to make a special tool to take the plug out. Regards, Mike LaRosa
Hi Vesa thanks for the post it is quite encouraging. I have started a Wayne Keith Style gasifier but havnt gotten very far I need to quit being lazy and get to work!!.There are a few things about the Imbert gasifier that I like better, but it doesnt seem to produce enough woodgas or the engine is under sized my truck is pretty heavy, but I have driven over 15000 mi on wood and it works fairly good. I was curious about the supercharger and it should only take a few changes and it should help. My truck has a 300cid and will go 60 mph on the flat ground but I would like to pull a trailer also.
Do you have any photos of some of your projects? Did you use an imbert style gasifier.?
Thanks Ron L.
Hello and welcome here with your real world experiences boost pressurizing woodgas into vehicle engines.
Ha! Ha! Unfortunatly your similar name to Vesa MIKONEN also from Finland will cause confusion.
We wiil find a way to distinguish you.
We have two prominent Chris’s posting up here with similar last names so a simple last initial has not worked. Chris Saenz = ChrisKY from Kentucky (also AdminChris). And Chris Seymour = ChrisMO from Missouri.
And also Lots and lots of John’s here some with similar initials last names. So . . . Dutch John, JohnB., JohnC., up through JohnS, etc.
I did see pictures of your VW pickup. Nice. So choose an idenifier fast or you will be started called VesaVW!
TurboVesa has a nice sound but since you both do turbo work . . . well, you see. The other VesaM will now have to become VesaBookman or VesatheEngineer.
MikeL’s (Mike LaRosa) refernce to “TJ” is to Terry Huston. Why the “J”? I do not know. He chose that. Lots of woodgasing Terry’s talking also. TJ gets much confued for “DJ” (Dutch John).
Good turbo info again.
Class: 0,5 bar would be ~7.5 PSI boost. One bar = 1 atmoshere = ~14.2 to 14.7 PSI. A medium pressure system. My handy dandy dual scale measuring tape says 50 cm would be between 19 and 20 inches of negative pressure. See - easy.
Regards, the one and only woodgasing
Steve Unruh
(But 13 other real actual Steve, Steven, Stephen Unruh’s in the US and Canada - two complain MY woodgassing interfers with thier own Internet identifications )
1 Like
Hello vw Vesa ,
No matter if you wrote book or not , Welcome aboard.
Vesa, What’s the difference between Makinen with the 2 dots over the a or the other way, MIKONEN. Us yanks pronounce it about the same way. Maybe the other Vesa will check into this humble group and take a look ?? Is Vesa a very common name in your neighborhood like Mike is here ?? I would hope the other Vesa would take advantage of some of the things that Wayne has figured out and shared. Good luck with your projects but those tiny cars are probably unsafe at the high speeds ??? Do you ever hear from Fredrik Ek or Eerin R or Max ?? I probably made a mistake on on Eerin’s name. The last name is something like Rosenstrom ??? Max pops in from time to time on the Yahoo woodgas group but I guess it’s more important to spend time at his place on the water or in Helsinke. I’m guessing he is around 80 now ?? Fredrik was making babies and I don’t know what Eerin is up to but I think the gasifier on his Audi got damaged in a wreck or something ?? I hope you guys get together as we attempt to do here. Oh, good luck with the VW’s … They are all gone here now due to salt … I have to build with thick metal. I gave up on oil drums and aluminum as they rot through too fast here … Mike LaRosa
BTW, Moisture + woodgas + salt mist = rust holes. Happens even in Florida. Ask Bruce or Sean F.
The road gravel doesn’t help the paint either up here in the northern areas :o)
They are also using some newer de-icing chemicals here that are really tearing up the iron.
Regards, still in 8 inches of solid ice (in spots) … Mike
PS, I could not get the plug out of my transmission today. I made a tool to do it but even with the breaker bar I don’t have the strength. I could tell I was going to bend and snap my tool. I will consult the younger man on this and hope he has the real tool and bigger hammer to get it out. I wish the last guy didn’t put it in so tight. salt corrosion on dissimilar metals is bad news here. If the last guy had just hand tightened it I would have no problems as some tranny oil would have kept it lubed up …
soak it down good with PB Blaster ( about 10 - 12 hours…) then tap it with a hammer before trying to turn it…it should come out very easy then…if you try without the penetrating oil…you will either strip out the threads…or brake off the fitting…
Good Luck Mike,
Dennis
Thanks Dennis, I will try again in a few days. I’m sore from this last try. Laying underneath a truck on 2 inches of ice is not the best approach. I got soaked and my tools melted into the ice. I hope your Bolens is still running.
I feel older than I think I am :o) …
Mike
Welcome Vesa,it’s great to hear from Finland.
Thanks for everyone about wellcoming me.
Mike L: Mikkonen ja Mäkinen are two different words and names. Eerin, Fredrik and Max (=Bero) are my friends. And yes small cars are more unsafe compared to bigger cars if you chrush it, but you better not hit anything. I have allso a bigger woodgas car…
Steve: I´ll try find better name.
And back to basis: Supercharging a woodgas engine is as simple as with gasoline. But a roots blower takes power from crankshaft and that is quite much. For example if we have a 305CID engine, we can achieve without blower something like 80 hp at 3000rpm (usually less). 8 psi overpressure will give about 50% more energy to motor,. That would make 40 hp extra power, but a roots blower needs ~20 hp from cranksaft, so power will rise only 20 hp.
Turbocharging is not so simple. Woodgas has less energy compared to gasoline. That means exhaustgases will have allso less energy. That is why we have to use smaller turbine housing or the hole turbineside to get good results. At compressorside we have same volumes, but becouse of gaselines underpressure, we need to use carbon seal instead of piston ring sealing. With turbocharging we can get more power with same overpressure compared to roots blower.
Vesa “something”
Hmmmm…Vesa-Turbo sort of has a nice ring to it…
What about the soot on the turbo blower will it cause a problem, and the temp will probably be higher also will it ignite the wg prematurely?
Other wise the turbo seems like the better of the two options?
Hi Vesa, I made a mistake the one time. I won’t do it again. I will look for the letter a with 2 dots over it. I was just curious if they were pronounced the same or differently. The Finland guys really helped us back when we were getting going here years ago. I think Eerin got my head screwed on straight in regards to what the restriction does. Both Wayne and I played with that for a while and then we played with reduction tubes and then finally nozzles or blow holes as Wayne has called them. I got the term planar cracking zone from one of those Finland guys. Eventually I got the mental picture as to how it all works and I haven’t had any problems or tar since. The only issue I had was they kept trying to repair old Imberts and were making replacement parts for them. As we had none of that stuff here, we had to make do with local materials. I found certain types of brake rotors to make perfect and reliable hearths that require little welding and Wayne found a way to pack 4 times the oxidation into the same space but he is a professional welder. It’s been fun and still is.
Back to turbos, I have never had a vehicle with one. My daughter has a VW Jetta with a turbo diesel. I don’t know if she gains anything from it. I know this S-10 truck I just bought with a 2.2 liter accelerates faster than my wife’s car of similar weight and same size engine. I would be inclined to just run a large engine in a light vehicle as Wayne has been doing. The other Vesa was running a big old Lincoln with a huge engine your way. Run big pipes to keep the restriction down and let er eat. In real driving, even a turbo pumped vehicle still has to stop at stop signs and traffic lights and the gasifier will shut down at these and need to recover. Wayne found when he went to the salt flats that waiting in line killed his gasifier so it was tough to accelerate to do the mile. Now a turbo or other type of pump might help to keep the gasifier going if you could dump gas prior to starting the timed track and then re-direct it to the engine after “take off”. I’d better stop typing … Party on … Mike