My Charcoal Gasifier Page
Last Updated: October 20, 2023
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Making and Running a Charoal Gasifier
Here are two of the seven charcoal gasifiers that we made during the spring of 2015:
During the first part of 2015, my friend George Adams formed a group of 6 people from within about a 30 radius of Menominee Wisconsin.
The intent was to build a bunch of charcoal-fueled gasifiers to be used to fuel gasoline engines on the general design of the
Gary Gilmore "Simple-fire".
George did some modifications to that design and then secured the use of a local school's technology shop in exchange for
extensive service work that he had done on the shop's CNC plasma cutter.
We met one night a week for about 7 weeks to build our seven machines (I built two of them).
Here's a shot during one of the construction sessions:
And another:
Here is the castable refractory hearth that George designed:
Here it is seated at the bottom of the 16 gallon drum reactor:
Yes, I know that I got the grate slightly off center!
George had actually built and tested a complete prototype using a smaller, 6 gallon reactor drum.
Here's a video of that one, fueling a Case garden tractor:
George's prototype charcoal gasifier
Here's a video of the first one off the "production line", running an Onan generator set:
Production serial number 1 testing
More to come later. Right now I am building my inventory of charcoal. To date I have 5 1/2 55 gallon drums of it.
Nope! Now I have 8 barrels full of charcoal.
Here's how I make the charcoal
Here's a picture of 10 feet of 1" conduit bent into a spiral as a gas cooler. I haven't tried it out yet:
