94 Dodge Ram running on wood gas.

Here is a guy that seems to really have it down, he has driven over 40,000 miles on wood gas.



Here is a link to his website.

http://driveonwood.com/

Wayne has a very successful gasifier system. a little labour intensive but i works and has a real good track record

Oh, I think last time I heard it was more like 250000 miles under his belt on wood... he has driven coast to coast and back... drives everyday on wood... has had his trucks looked at and tested by the university of Alabama.

His site is worth a look.

tritowns wrote:

Wayne has a very successful gasifier system. a little labour intensive but i works and has a real good track record

Oh, I think last time I heard it was more like 250000 miles under his belt on wood... he has driven coast to coast and back... drives everyday on wood... has had his trucks looked at and tested by the university of Alabama.

His site is worth a look.

He let me know later how many miles he has under his belt now, I am sold on his system, plan on building one this summer for my Dodge 1500 4x4

then try this link

please don't take this wrong, but mr. tesdalonian is a hack compared to Wayne...

i hate to say it but most of what you see on the internet when it comes to gasifies is pure trash.

show me a system that repeatably makes good gas, has hundreds or better yet thousands of hours of operation on it an then i'll recommend others to build it or follow ha set of instructions. mr. tesalonian doesnt come close to that

tritowns wrote:

please don't take this wrong, but mr. tesdalonian is a hack compared to Wayne...

i hate to say it but most of what you see on the internet when it comes to gasifies is pure trash.

show me a system that repeatably makes good gas, has hundreds or better yet thousands of hours of operation on it an then i'll recommend others to build it or follow ha set of instructions. mr. tesalonian doesnt come close to that

I agree with your assessment completely.

tritowns wrote:

Wayne has a very successful gasifier system. a little labour intensive but i works and has a real good track record

Oh, I think last time I heard it was more like 250000 miles under his belt on wood... he has driven coast to coast and back... drives everyday on wood... has had his trucks looked at and tested by the university of Alabama.

His site is worth a look.

Amazing Stuff ! Next will be someone following right behind, who has figured out a way to raise the price of Wood!  :twisted:

I know i can buy beautifully made chips from local suppliers for around 95 - 100 a ton... that's equal to about 100 gallons of gasoline. as long as there is a pulp and paper or wafer board industry those prices will be fairly constant.

I can always build a gasified tractor and run a plate chipper to make my own, by gathering wood of my own land....

tritowns, So you have your own wood gasifier vehicle ?

i have a stationary unit... i will at some point build a wood gas truck. That being said, my good friend does have one which i have had the good forture of driving. His is based on Wayne's design.

tritowns, I did look at Wayne's website and I did see that he sells his plans. Since I know nothing of this gasifier process, Is there some kind of a top guarded secret as to how it all works?

well he asks those that buy his plans not to share them... I do understand... he has taken years of time, and thousands of dollars perfecting his gasser. I know of one other system (automotive) that works very well, that fellow wants hundreds of dollars for his book and you have to sign a non disclosure agreement before he'll sell it to you. with the 50 bucks you do also get 6 months of the premium side of his site where you can get expert guidance in your build, that has got to be worth something.

gasification is simple... pass wood smoke through a super heated oxygen deprived bed of char and you'll make wood gas.. see, simple... it's in the doing that you find it's not so easy to do it well and repeatably.

We sell our stationary system. I know we have over 100000.00 in it's development. It works good, we are doing things that some of the other big companies are not doing... APL is just kinda implementing... and not doing some of those things that we have been doing as well as we are i might add. APL has been working on their system for over 5 years and has many hands in on its development (GEK} they called it an experimenters kit for good reason, if you built one you were doing beta testing for them.

I believe a properly designed system shouldn't need hopper or grate aggitation.

I'm sure you'd understand if I don't share everything I have come to know about our system. some of it is proprietitary.

All that being said, if someone needed help with math or just general gasifing questions answered i'm always more than happy to help where i can. and i can promise i'll never steer anyone in a wrong direction. heck, i've helped some of my competitors when they asked...

almost sounds like a rant... lol... not ment to be. If you have questions please feel free to ask.

tritowns, Thanks for taking the time to explain that for me, I am very respectful and understanding when it comes to this kind of thing.

I personally know how a person can invest a countless amount of hours and ones own money into something they're very passionate about. Then to have some  scumbag come by and grab their ideas and run with it and make millions. Yeah, not good and it happens all to often! :evil: 

If I didn't have so many irons in the fire myself, I would probably pursue this more. Thanks Again, DK

I have found that most people in this group aren't looking for someone to do all the work for them... and that is how this group will advance... many hands working toward a common goal, even if we're doing it differently. I will at some point put together a small system, put up vids, and drawing that anyone can duplicate... I have many pokers in the fire too...

just a matter of time to get it done.

Interesting. I read about "producer gas" years ago but wondered why few pursue the gasification technologies.

Durning WW2 there were over 1000000 automobiles running on wood.You could buy a brand new ford at a dealership in Arustrailia with a gasifier already mounted even. With the end of the war fuel became available again and it was cheap and easy to use.

I hate to say it, people are lazy. Wood gas requires some work to use well. Heck I've had more than one person tell me that if they can't just jump in their car start it and drive away then they couldn't be bothered.

I don't believe in a fuel shortage, or an oil shortage or any of that. What I do believe is I may not always be able to afford to pay the asking price at the pump... so... I look to wood gas.

I get to start building a unit for a customers tractor this week. Kinda excited.

Most wood gas vehicle conversions can also run on gasoline.

Of course, Wayne can switch on the fly back and forth. Heck, he can even trickle a little gasoline in if he feels he needs more power, run in hybrid mode if you will.

Again though, it requires some work as it isn't totally automated and like i said, most people are plain lazy.

At some point i'll but together a wood gas truck. I have had the opportunity to drive my friends truck and I'll say it was pretty impressive. He built a WK system.

Wayne is my hero. He is not an engineer but was willing to learn, fail, and improve.

My daily driver is a 190,000 Geo Metro with low compression which still gets 50 MPG every day of the year. I don't need wood gas for transportation - yet. I have considered wood gas for home power generation. I think one of the flathead Onan gen sets for RVs might be a good choice. A flathead is generally easier to clean the varnish should something go wrong with the gas filtering.

This is off topic :
An advancement would be a safe steam engine that can be fueled with wood. Safe, meaning that the steam boiler did not require an operator to actively monitor the system. There has been some progress on that front with products likely to become available within the next couple years, but the generator sets are not likely to be sold at Home Depot, likely require an engineer to integrate into a factory system. I think the new steam patents are in areas that can be approached using "open source" techniques. Steam power generation from wood as fuel is good because as an external combustion engine there is no concern about wood gases producing tar and varnish inside the engine. Its just that currently a boiler can be like a bomb - but even that isn't totally true as some steam generators contain a relatively small amount of water, that a leak would only shut it down. The boilers that get the bad name for safety are the fire tube, like older locomotives used. Those contain a lot of water and have a large surface area that can rupture.

tim id leave steam alone as theres just one thing with that it has to burn wood at high output thats why coal was better used for steam locos as they produce raw power for pulling and really havent been beaten as of yet

however for electric generation a constant heat at low temps via another way id have thought was much better thoe i must stress id store the gas in a cylinder and use that for cooking upon

Gadily, I am not planning on building a steam engine. There has been successful research on using biomass for small scale steam engines. The effort is not likely to be a consumer product any time soon. Test results have been encouraging, particularly for low pressure steam engines, and waste heat recovery engines that might be installed in an industrial exhaust stack to use otherwise wasted energy. The new type of steam generators use a relatively small amount of water and aren't considered to be dangerous. Many details aren't being made public. An engineering department at Ohio State University has tested this particular design. The testing concerns was less of the safety of the steam engine - the reliability and maintenance costs were a bigger hurdle. An OEM product of this type is to be manufactured for 2014. These small engines produce less than 10 Khw electricity, and are intended to be embedded in other industrial systems, its not a turnkey product by no means. BMW has developed similar waste heat steam engines to recycle exhaust heat from its automobile engines. The technology is functional but the recovery engine is too still bulky to be packaged in an automobile. A steam engine that is too large to be installed in a vehicle, might just work for a rocket heater. I'm hopeful that others develop the potential.

My friend Stephen (a jet engine engineer) built his gasifier to make steam for a small steam turbine he was designing... after two or three scary steam engine run aways (this is a fellow that is used to spinning things fast) he gave that up and just makes wood gas to run a regular genset.

I have very litle worry about making tar with a well designed gasifier and an operator that has an idea as to what he is doing. I'm not one of those push a button and it works kinda guys when it comes to gasification. A knowledgable operator can make make useable wood gas with a very simple system.

Here is some info on so called waste heat engines. Not yet a consumer device. Most WHE require a steady 500 F degree heat source. That is why coal, propane or natural gas is preferred to wood for steam. An automated wood chip stove might achieve better regulated heat ( if we can first learn to do that I'd quit and call it good ).

Automakers are working on ways to recover the 60 percent of the energy that is lost to heat in an ICE. Some of the ideas that now seem oddball might soon be in millions of vehicles. Future ICE powered automobiles might have a smaller radiator, or maybe no radiator at all. In the '70s I recall reading about BMW research on heat recovery, they're still working on it. Some wood stoves use small wattage thermoelectric generators (TEG).

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/01/waste-heat-engine-finally-moving-to.html
http://www.wfs.org/futurist/july-august-2012-vol-46-no-4/harvesting-vehicles%E2%80%99-waste-heat
http://articles.sae.org/10647/

If I were using wood heat most of my energy needs would be for air conditioning. Electricity needed for lighting the home would be minimal. If you could run the A/C compressor directly from an ICE that used wood gas, instead of producing electricity first, that might work well. I figure there could be a jackshaft with clutches that could run the A/C compressor and/or a generator. When the A/C pump cycled off the generator would run. The A/C compressor of an automobile such as a SUV is in theory large enough to cool many homes, 5 tons or so. I need the electricity less than I need the cooling. The automotive HVAC components are relatively inexpensive. I might run this type of system for about four hours a day - to cool down the home, then use the regular HVAC system at night when the wood gas system is shut down.