Oh yeah ofc, feel free to ask anything I don't mind writing a novel about it lol

 

Yes that is correct, it has to be an onboard device. I'll be working out later on how to make the unit able to tilt around like a nautical candle so that it can stay upright during wheelin' operations, if I find that it needs that mod.

 

Here's some testing with the diaphragm, hooked up to the timing advance line on my '87 here. I needed to see exactly how this diaphragm behaves under vacuum. Revving the motor causes the diaphragm to contract proportionally, but the diaphragm is fully contracted when the throttle is only ¼ open. This will likely prove to be an issue, and I will solve it with the addition of a spring to add resistance to its movement.

They seem to be rare, but '87 pickups did come with a carb'd 22R on occasion.



Here I'm using India ink to see where these vac lines go. Usually I would use water here but that doesn't show up on camera well, even if it were in color. After doing my experiments with the vacuum diaphragm and the '87, I traced the lines from the distributor advance to this spot on the carburetor. I know the 20R and 22R carburetors are different, but in this case they are the same. Luckily for me, the 20R distributor only has one port for vacuum advance, and there are three lines here and they all go to about the same place; you can see the ink running out through a small hole beneath the 1st barrel throttle butterfly in the left side of the barrel in the bottom picture. Here there are actually two holes, the one the ink is leaking out of in the photo comes from the vacuum hookup that I'm squirting ink into in the top photo. It is obscured by rust, adding resistance to flow and so needs to be cleaned, and is a good example of why aluminum-bodied carburetors are superior. The slightly larger hole above it goes to the other two vac ports. Two of these lines will be used to control the fuel pump diaphragm, and the other one will control the distributor. The pin that you see poking out of the side of the barrel is the end of the fuel/air ratio screw. This screw is no longer necessary, so I removed the spring from the inside and then drove the screw all the way back in until it was sealed.

 

Here we go with some diagrams. Sometimes I wish Yotatech could put the images into thumbnails so that they weren't so huge on the page, as having them so big makes it problematic to scroll so much.



Here's a standard-type gasifier, which I have put an exhaust jacket around, labeled here as the "Exhaust Gas Energy Conservation Cavity." The purpose of this is as follows; because a combustion engine is a "heat engine," the less that you do nothing with, the lower your efficiency. Hot exhaust running out of an engine is power wasted and this contributes a lot to why an engine like a 22R only makes usable power from about 24% of the fuel it burns. Preventing heat losses and raising efficiency is part of the reason engines have EGR systems and the like. In a wood gas system, the gasifier/engine efficiency can be greatly improved by putting the exhaust heat back into the gasifier, as it helps the reaction process and ultimately results in less fuel being consumed to produce any given amount of gas.



This is the diagram of the hearth. This part of the gasifier needs to stay at at least 1100°C, which is just a tad above 2,000°F. I've got Plaster of Paris in here as insulation, because I don't want to be toying around with asbestos. It's unfortunate that such a perfect insulator must be so deadly. Another example of relevant information not being available: The diameter of the hearth is determined by the displacement of the engine, and I have been unable to find any kind of formula to determine what my diameter needs to be for 2.6 liters at operating speed. I will have to find this formula on my own, and I will be starting with a 6" hearth. The process will be as follows: set the engine to idle at minimum operating speed, and periodically open the ash collection door to read the hearth's temperature with an infrared temperature gun. Adjust the hearth diameter until it operates at 1100° centigrade at the set RPM. That minimum speed will likely be higher than the speed that the engine is capable of idling at, and so if the engine is set to idle lower than the operating speed, the gasifier will not crack tars properly and excessive tar buildup in filters will occur when idling lower. Because of this, the engine's idle speed should be set high ~ at a speed likely 250-400 RPM faster than its minimum.



I'm gravitating more toward this device, as it has many advantages, yet is not without its drawbacks. The most obvious advantage is the size, an 8" outside diameter with a 10" base, which is much more space efficient than the two to three foot diameter of the traditional design, hence why I'm calling the first design the "fatbody" unit. The next advantage is the perfectly cylindrical design from the loading hatch all the way to the grate. This is a big benefit over the traditional design as it does not have so many problems with irregularly sized pieces jamming the system; the traditional design requires uniformly cut blocks of wood, I have designed this one to run using axe-split firewood and other gathered materials. In this "pipe" design, pieces of wood are stacked end-to-end on top of each other, but the drawback of this design is for it to be reasonably sized it can only hold two or 3 pieces of 12" lengths of wood, which is likely only fifteen to twenty pounds, versus the traditional unit which can hold well over a hundred. Both designs can be refilled while in operation, and so refueling isn't that much of an issue, and with the attention I've paid to detail I should be able to get well more than the one-mile-per-pound that's typical of vehicles using this system, so this unit fully loaded should take the truck about the same distance as a couple gallons of gas. Of course with all of that bed space, more fuel can be brought along.

Another thing of note: The traditional design would have to be modified to have a loading door on the side, with all the sealing issues that come with it, as having a unit which loads from the top will be problematic for the roof rack I'm going to be sticking on this thing in the future. The slim design can be built at an angle, i.e., instead of having the "tube" design sit straight upward I can build it with a lean to it, both to clear the rack and also to potentially make it longer. Another neat little benefit; if the gasifier's exhaust jacket were filled with baffles or steel wool, it would help with heat retainment as well as serve the purpose of a muffler.

Carbon monoxide is one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases because of the time that it takes to break down in the atmosphere. Even though this system is carbon neutral, and could easily be a bit carbon negative, any unburnt carbon monoxide that is emitted by the vehicle, even though it would eventually be taken care of by this biofuel cycle, can still present some issues for the environment simply due to the time it takes for it to break down. Because the engine runs mainly on carbon monoxide and hydrogen, very little if any of this gas should be escaping out of the exhaust. However, there is a very beneficial solution to this problem; the exhaust jacket, optimally, should be filled with the media from an exhaust catalyst. This will not only convert the remaining carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide, which in this particular fuel cycle is an entirely harmless gas, but while doing so this reaction will release heat into the core. Adding heat into the core means that less oxygen will have to be admitted in order for the gas-emitting reaction to heat the core on its own, which means that a lower percentage of gas overall will need to be sacrificed in order for the gasification reaction to be sustained, and this spare gas resulting adds to the amount of gas which is sent to the engine. Not only will this upgrade the exhaust gas into a truly ecologically harmless product, but will also result in a net gain in how much usable gas is extracted from any given amount of fuel-producing media. Unlike the smog systems of the regular gasoline engine, this will not only result in an improvement in engine emissions, but will also result in a decrease in fuel consumption and an increase in power.

 

Gas system update; incredible stupidity edition.

Always make sure that you know exactly what you're working with and that it goes together how it's supposed to, before you go and do a bunch of stuff to it.


I've come to discover that this carb does not go to a 20R, it goes onto a 4A-F engine from the E90 Toyota Corolla, which has a carb design almost identical to the 20R. Now that I'd done all these modifications to it I decided to install it and that was when I found out it didn't fit.

Now is the time for damage control. Because of the lower speed that this engine will be turning, the unmodifiably smaller barrels of the 4A-F carburetor should not cause a significant enough flow restriction to effect the horsepower or torque of this motor. That being the important part, it means this desegregator I've built can still be used. Since I am not willing to set my work aside to go and modify yet another old carburetor that somebody might need, I've decided to still use this one.



I'm having to measure now, overlooking simple things always results in more work later on. I've got a ½" piece of steel bar to make an adaptor plate out of. I suppose this is a good enough time as any to test out the acetylene rig that I bought for this project.

 

A little note on the stroker crank.


LCE says to notch the oil galley between .080" and .012", to clear the rods by .030". In their photo they did it a little less neatly than I did it here, and by what I've learned, the more neat and clean something looks, the more reliable it tends to be, as a general rule. I did the rough work with a Dremel tool, and cleaned it up with a file. Having a strong magnet comes in handy to clean up iron shavings. For some reason or another, they don't have this plainly posted on the stroker kit order page.

 

I had to cut just a little off of the spacer and shave off a little edge in the bottom of the center section of the desegregator. Indian Head being as it is, the sealed gasket remained intact as the two sections came apart with a positive click.




As I said the 4A-F and 20R carbs are almost identical, this is the original device built from the 4A-F carburetor, with the throttle section (bottom third) removed and replaced by the one from the 20R. As evident in the photo, since the 20R carburetor has a plastic spacer, the distance between the idle control cam and the arm it interacts with is greater, and so I had to use the high idle linkage from the 20R to build a new one. Because the cam is longer, it interfered with the second butterfly's return spring, and so I had to move that to the left. This made the return spring too tough to move, and so I used a new spring that I got from the 20R carburetor.


Having the 20R base plate on this will lend itself well to gas input, as there is not a throttle return spring running diagonally across the front of the body where the fuel must be put in.

The idle set tab, which is held by the idle adjustment screw, needed to be bent slightly so that the gap between the tab and the face of the adjustment screw is smaller when the screw is backed all the way out. This tab is what the screwdriver is pointed at. The result is that the idle adjustment screw can control idle speed in a wider range, which is important as the amount of potential energy in the fuel mixture is less dense, which means the throttle plate has to be more open in order to achieve a given idle speed than it would have to be for a gasoline mixture. On the other side of this casting which the idle control screw threads into, the throttle axis stop hits the surface of the casting to prevent the throttle plates from turning further than fully open. The arm which opens the second butterfly, seen here with a little bit of grinder flashing on its edge, had to be ground down a bit so that this throttle axis stop would actually hit, otherwise the throttle rotation was stopped by the plates themselves, meaning that if the throttle pedal were depressed hard that they could get bent or stuck partially or fully open. This was a thing that was happening with the second butterfly when the throttle was rotated fully open with just a little bit of force by hand. After minor touching up, the system works as needed. Because of the design, when installed in the truck there will be a positive increase in the amount of force required to depress the throttle pedal between the opening of the first butterfly and the second.

 

Now that all of the things that would be in the way of the choke plate have been removed, I've installed the plate on backward. This is because I have to mount the choke control arm downward, so that it does not interfere with the air filter housing. Because of this, the choke line would open the plate when pulled, and close it when pushed, which is opposite of the way a manual choke system tends to be set up. By taking off the choke plate, rotating the axis pin, then reinstalling the plate, I have made the choke plate open when the pin is rotated in a counterclockwise direction instead of in a clockwise one, when referring to the control arm end of the axis. This reverses the push-pull/close-open system of the choke control line into a push-pull/open-close one.

Because the axis of rotation is offset from the center of the choke plate, engine vacuum will pull harder on one side of it then the other. From the control arm end of the axis, this larger side of the plate is on the right side of the axis, and the smaller one on the left. From 0° down; if the choke plate were to stop shut when rotating counterclockwise, it would stop a little bit past 90° and vacuum would pull on that end harder than on the smaller side, thus naturally pulling it open. This is its normal mechanism on a carburetor. Now that it has been changed, it stops shut when rotating clockwise just before 90°, and so is naturally pulled shut by the engine vacuum. This is a slight problem, and to prevent it it must be ensured that the choke control line has enough resistance to movement that engine vacuum does not pull shut the choke plate. It would also be possible to simply pull on the choke control arm from the other direction, i.e., from the 90° position instead of the 270° position, however this would require the choke line to turn 90° and then another 180° on its path from the knob to the plate control arm, instead of just one 90° turn. These angles can cause binding in the line as well as premature wear, and so I have decided to use the system above instead. I will add slick resistance to the choke's rotation, either by adding a thick grease inside of the line, or by adding a rubber ring to the choke axis pin to give it some traction and therefore resistance, or by some similar mechanism, if I find that some resistance is needed.

 

Here's the new-to-me dual-row timing cover. Even though the focus of this project has been maximum heat efficiency, there's no way in hell a single-row timing chain is coming close to this motor.

Speaking of maximum heat efficiency, if you were ever wondering why Toyota went to the single-row engine breaker in the first place, it was for this purpose.

 

I don't know why I didn't think of this when I responded to you earlier; there exists a method called the "Fischer-Tropsch process" which uses metal catalysts, heat, and pressure, to convert carbon monoxide and hydrogen mixtures into hydrocarbon chains. If you hooked one of these gasifiers up to it, you could take the wood gas and turn it into gasoline. Then instead of having a reactor on your truck, you could just fill your truck with gasoline like you normally would do. You'd make several biproducts, such as biodiesel, and you could also use this system to make your own motor oil. I'll be working on a system like this in the future as a reactor of this type is a whole different beast of its own, and requires some special tooling to identify what exactly is coming out of the end of it, but if you're really interested in this whole DIY fuels thing, well, I've put all my information here for anyone to use, so take it and go hook an F-T reactor up to it and share with me what you've come up with.

Biogasoline is what we have here, a renewable fuel but still just gasoline. I don't know how much gasoline could be produced with any given amount of wood, but I do know that you'll get less driving time than if you just used a gasifier. It may still turn out cheaper than buying gasoline at today's prices, and if for some reason you can't put a reactor onto a vehicle than using this process can be a viable option.

 

I've gotten the 35-pounder in. I'm sure I've explained it in this textbook of a thread somewhere but I'm going to go over it just in case. The purpose of the heavier flywheel is to smooth out the running of the engine at lower speeds. The rule of torque when it comes to internal combustion piston engines: a heavier flywheel allows an engine to run more smoothly at lower speeds, which enables it to produce torque at lower speeds. The torque curve of the engine will progress into a higher RPM range proportionally to any decrease in a flywheel's weight. This is the same reason those old hot bulb engines could make usable torque at 600 RPM while a modern engine has to exceed 1,000 to be useful for anything, and the reason they are built like this is related to the laminar flame speed of a gasoline mixture; to increase heat efficiency. Due to the laminar flame speed of producer gas; being mainly slow-burning carbon monoxide mixed with some hydrogen and including a lot of nitrogen, steam, and carbon dioxide which retard the combustion further, the flame speed of the producer gas is much lower, which means the maximum heat efficiency will be at a lower speed, which translates into potential torque production peaking at a lower RPM. However, this torque cannot be produced at these speeds as the standard 24-pound flywheel will not enable the engine to run smoothly at these low RPMs, at least not under load, and so a heavier flywheel is needed in order to compensate for this. With the stroker crank thrown into the mix, it is likely that without the heavier flywheel the engine may not be able to start in the first place.

I would like to add in, none of these engine modifications are necessary to make the vehicle run on producer gas. It is possible to do, and besides this specific project of mine, has always been done, without any engine modifications. This gasification technology was invented as a plug-and-play system to account for fuel shortages, and everyone who has done it before has installed it in a way where the operator can switch between gasoline and producer gas at will. However, I intend my system to be a permanent modification, to do away with buying gasoline, and to retain my vehicle's off-road abilities. Because of my intentions, combined with that I have to rebuild my blown motor anyway, I've decided to go full-out with it. However, gasifiers do not need to be particularly designed for nor tuned to any specific engine to reach their peak performance, and so any of these gasifier drawings could be built and slapped onto an unmodified engine and make it go. Exhaust rerouting through the gasifier body, the fuel pump, and the desegregator are in this design for the purposes of efficiency, and they could be done away with, for the sake of simplicity but at the sacrifice of some power, in favor of pulling the gasifier with simple manifold vacuum and mixing the gas with air via a simple ball valve. The overall power output of the engine using the ubiquitous plug-and-play method, especially on something like a 22R, will be significantly less, which is why gas guzzlers from the '70s are so preferred for these conversions, but it can be done, and it can be done in a couple days' time with some sheet metal and a welder. So if you're interested in toying around with this technology, don't let the expensive mods and technical things I've put here dissuade you, you can just build a simple gasifier and filter and slap it on. But please, for the love of god don't build the stratified gasifier from the FEMA booklet because it'll ruin your motor.

If any of the commenters are still here, I've gone through and edited some of my replies to give you better information.

 

In between the two barrels, there are holes on either side. One of them is a screw hole, and the other has something to do with the vacuum system. The vacuum system hole roughly lines up with one of the threaded holes in the bottom of the 4A-F carburetor midsection, and so I'm drilling it out here so that I can screw the baseplate onto it solidly. I'll still have to be a bit generous with the shellac in order to get it to seal good, but this modification is necessary so that the pieces will fit together.



Drilled through and countersunk, the outer wall of the screw hole became too thin and broke out, so you can see the head of the screw inside. I did this because I lost the longer screw that came off of the 20R and so I had to use the shorter screw from the 4A-F. By miracle or divine intervention, the camera managed to focus in on the screw instead of some other irrelevant thing. I did have to modify the dimensions of the screw a bit.



Here's a photo of the desegregator complete and installed and this time it's actually on there properly. Not all was bad news with finding out the carburetor I modified was from a 4A-F, as since it is from a motor which was meant to be mounted transversely, the air intake line will either pass into the left side fender, or I can rotate it to pass through the firewall, meaning it will not need to be so extensively modified to hook up to a snorkel, and I can use the original air filter housing and air intake line from a 4A-F to do so.

Of note: The 4A-F carburetor body, with its smaller barrels, is more than adequate for this application. Considering the slow laminar flame speed of producer gas, and the increased stroke, the engine is unlikely to meet or exceed 2,500 RPM. The 4A-F engine, with a 1.6L displacement, will draw 9,600 Liters per minute through its carburetor at 6,000 RPM, and this isn't even the max RPM it can achieve. If we consider 2,500 RPM to be the maximum speed of the producer gas engine, its 2.6L displacement works out to a 6,500 LpM draw at 2,500 RPM, well within the confines of the 4A-F carburetor's dimensions.

 

I like what you are doing here. Legit mad scientist stuff. A friend had a gasifier set-up on an old Ford pickup in CT and i’ve read about it in the past.
Any chance i can convince you to give up on the black and white photos though?

 

Not fond of black and white? For why?

That's neat that you have come across this before. Any chance he's got some of my missing data? I'd really appreciate the engine model and max RPM of it, or any other syngas wisdom. I suppose the greyscale photos aren't mandatory.

 

I think color would better illustrate the details of the modifications you are making. As late as 2000 when I still worked in live TV we still used some black and white monitors as small as 4” but details weren’t important on those, they were more or less just to prove signal presence.
Sorry, i only see that friend about once a year when we cross paths at a big swap meet so we’re not currently in contact.

 

I suppose so, I can't change my previous photos from black and white because they were taken in that format, but I can go color from here.

Ah I thought I lucked out there.

 

It is possible to calculate horsepower on a broad range by dividing the displacement by power output.

2,400÷97=24.74

With this one finds that the 22R produces 1 horsepower for every 24.74cc of displacement.

Taking this information, divide 2,400 by 24.74 and get 97. Therefore, we can now plug the actual displacement into the formula; 2,600÷24.74, and get 105.

The result is that the stroker kit, raising displacement to 2,600cc, should up the horsepower to about 105.

To find for the 30% loss, multiply 0.3 by 105. That's a loss of 31.5 horsepower, giving a total of 73.5 horsepower.

This is assuming a stock 22R cylinder head.

I've heard claims of horsepower increase using a 20R head on a 22R that range between a more realistic boost to 125 horsepower to what I'm sure is an exaggerated claim of a boost to 180. I cannot find any dynamometer test results online and so this is yet another example of missing information, however a boost up to 125 horsepower is very realistic and probable, and so I'm going to use that number for my formula so that I can only go up.

Using the same math, some of which I've had to look up because I'm very bad at math; 2,400÷125=19.2. 2,600÷19.2=135.4. 0.3x135.4=40.62. 135.4-40.62=94.78. If the low-end number of 125 horsepower is correct, then the stroker kit plus the 20R head and the 30% loss of power should result in a theoretical output of about 94¾ horsepower at 5,000RPM. It's a theoretical output because the engine will not be able to reach 5,000RPM because of the flame speed. However, nobody just drives around with their motor at 5,000RPM, and so this information is still useful as the picture it paints shows that the horsepower output in any range will be very similar to stock output.

Another missing piece of information is the horsepower curve for a new 22R, but I have found a horsepower chart from LCE which compares a 300,000-mile stock 22R to some of their other engines. Using this chart I can get a crude idea of what I should expect here.

The chart begins with approximately 40 horsepower at 2,200 RPM, and about 65 horsepower at 3,000. With a new motor a speed of 2,200 would likely be between 46 to 48 horsepower, but for conservancy's sake I'll go off of the numbers presented here. With these approximate numbers we can get a rough estimate of what horsepower should be in a realistic setting, not that a 2-3 horsepower difference will mean much.

2,400÷40=60. 2,600÷60=43.3. 0.3x43.3=12.99. 43.3-12.99=30.31. The result is a power output of 30⅓ horsepower with a 22R head.

Now to find the percentage of horsepower which is increased by the addition of the 20R cylinder head. To do this we just take the power output with the stroker; 105HP, and find what percentage of 125 that is. 105÷125x100=84, 100-84=16, and this result is the increase added by the 20R head; 16%.


0.16x30.31=4.84, 30.31+4.84=35.1, and so the result is about 35 horsepower at 2,200RPM. Using the same formula for the high end, it comes out to 57.2 horsepower at 3,000RPM. Assuming this engine cannot exceed 2,500RPM, the same formula (with approximately 50HP@2.5k) spits out 43.92 horsepower at 2,500RPM.

Depending on whether the motor cannot exceed 2,500RPM or 3,000RPM, the maximum horsepower output of the motor will be about 44 or 57, respectively. This is a 12.4% drop in power from the stock 22R's 50 and 65 horsepower at the same speeds.

It is important to note that the LCE chart shows the engine producing 90 horsepower at 5,000RPM, though the engine was rated at 97 to 105 horsepower when it was new, depending on the year and whether it was the tall block or laser block. The engine in this chart is most likely a laser block, but I will err on the side of caution and assume it is a 97HP tall block.

A drop from 97 to 90 is a drop of 7.3%. Adding that to the conclusion, our low output of 35 and high of 44 or 57 multiplied by 1.073 (35x1.073 etc.) comes out to a real low of 37.5@2,200, 47.2@2,500, and 61@3,000.

If I could find the actual laminar flame speed of the gas in an engine with an 11:1 compression ratio, I could determinately tell what the maximum horsepower output and maximum RPM of the motor will be. This remains missing information, and remains ever so important. It's not quite a shot in the dark here, just a shot at shadows in a dark room.

 

No technical information today, just progress.


Check out that big chungus motor mount. That boi is an absolute unit.

The threaded post that sticks out of the top of the desegregator for purposes of screwing down the air filter box interfered with the hood, and so I'm going to have to figure out how to get some clearance. For the time being, I have removed it. It's a bit strange that this clearance issue exists considering it isn't significantly taller than a regular 20R carburetor.

 

I cut the exterior of the gasifier's body from an old culvert pipe. The rivets running down it add a nice aesthetic. I'll be welding tomorrow.


Here's the body of the main filter as well. I'm making the system mostly from scavenged parts.

 

When building the gasifier it is important that all seals are sealed well. On the left the seam has been ground after welding to check for leaks, and perhaps if I was a better welder this would not be necessary. Every imperfection has to be ground down to find any holes, the image on the right showing some which are particularly bad, so that they can be filled in with weld. Think of these holes as the equivalent of having a pinhole in a gas tank which drizzles fuel as the truck goes down the road.