Homemade Motor Fuel... From Firewood
(Page 3 of 5)
March/April 1981
Mother Earth News staff
"In my homeland, during the 1930's, horse-drawn vehicles were well on the way out ... and—although we did use working animals in the country and on smaller farms—petrol-driven machinery handled most of the labor and transportation tasks at the time. Now you probably know what happened in 1939-40. Within that year, Sweden was blockaded and completely cut off from any source of petroleum ... and we simply didn't have a domestic supply, except for any small amounts of gasoline that might have been stored by individuals or businesses.
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"Then, in the summer of 1940, a law was passed ... ordering us to stop all driving whatsoever! Every gallon of gasoline in the country belonged, from that moment on, to the government ... even the fuel in an individual citizen's automobile gas tank! Farmers couldn't get their food or milk to market, so they dumped what they couldn't use themselves. Stores were empty, while fire and police vehicles sat inoperative ... it was chaos for a while. After a bit, a rationing plan was adopted, but there obviously wasn't enough petrol to go around. So, in time, the country began to make the switch to wood gasification.
"I drove a 1936 Chevy flatbed for a living, and had to use wood chips for fuel. It wasn't as convenient as gasoline, but it got the job done and I was thankful. I figured that, under the best circumstances. I had about 75% of the power that gasoline would deliver, and only had to make minor timing changes to the engine ... though a few vehicles—including the American-made motorcycle I drove for a while—needed a compression ratio increase to use the wood gas effectively.
"Of course, the single most important fact about the switch to wood was that it kept all essential traffic moving. I really don't believe it would take much to spark a major conflict in the Middle East today, and we ought to prepare ourselves for the shortages that'd result ... while we have the chance to experiment."
A PREVIEW OF MOTHER'S OWN WOOD-POWERED TRUCK
We recently featured an article about an Iowa couple who beat the high price of gasoline by adapting a woodburning fuel-gas generator to their pickup truck (see MOTHER NO. 67, page 194). In the piece we mentioned that MOTHER's research crew was "hot" to build a gasification unit of their own design... and that we'd be reporting in a future issue on what we hoped would be an improved wood-fueled powerplant.
Well, the future is now, and—as sometimes happens—we have some good news end some not-so-good news. The good tidings, however, couldn't be better: Dennis Burkholder and Robyn Bryan (our resident experts on wood gas) have Indeed designed and built a producer-gas generator, which they've installed on our "old" alcohol-powered Chevy truck. The "cooker" itself seems to be working perfectly, and the fellows have even designed a dual-fuel carburetion unit which—as far as we know—is just flat unique. To date, the pickup has logged about 1,000 wood-gas miles with no problems ... and can hold its own in stop-and-go traffic, on hills, and along interstate highways.
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