Building a No-Weld Woodgas Generator! (A Functional Gasifier Built W/ a Hand Drill and Grinder?!)

[Music] so ladies and gentlemen i think it's safe to say that we live in uncertain times especially now more than ever i'm going to show you how you can build a device that powers a generator or a car or any kind of internal combustion engine using nothing more than wood scraps paper coal whatever you can burn that's organic and that device is called a wood gasifier this one is a little bit different design than one you may have seen previously on my channel that was a downdraft gasifier this is an entirely new version called a cross-draft gasifier most importantly in an effort to make these wood gasifiers and the knowledge of how to build them more accessible to people who probably need the most for example those that are off-grid or those who want to build one of these in a world where electricity may not be available again this is just a preparation mindset no implications but if you're here watching this video i think you know what i mean but anyway in the interest again of making this more accessible this unit was built nothing more than an angle grinder and a hand drill and parts that i can find lying around and so can you so i hope you find this video interesting i hope you learned something and i hope this may give you some food for thought so enjoy the video okay whether you buy the pressure pot new or used the first thing you'll want to do is burn it out and also burn out the container inside as well in my case this unit was well used so i need to make sure all the old residue and old paint is gone and out of it so it doesn't affect my system and even if it's new there'll be finishes that you need to get off because when you're running this as a gasifier if you haven't done this all of that crap will burn off with the heat and it'll end up running through your gas fire system and into your engine or whatever it is that you're running so i thought the simplest way to make sure that everything was perfectly clean was just to burn it out okay so this is the lid of the pressure pot next up everything on top needs to go and be sealed off with either a plug or even a simple bolt will do while we're here go ahead and remove this rubber gasket we'll be replacing it with a high temperature fiberglass one later on all right so i now have five holes in the top of this that need to be filled and the way i'm going to do that rather than spend money on brass plugs is simple 3 8 inch bolts washer on top washer on the bottom and some sealer in between this is permatex 80335 and the reason why we're going with it is because it resists temperatures up to 2000 degrees fahrenheit which is even more than orange rtv so i've sanded down all of these points to bare metal just on the top i'm going to go ahead and seal everything and then just sandwich those washers with this in the middle pretty straightforward okay so i'm gonna set this aside and while it's drying i'm going to work on a base for this thing that's now it is going to be a little bit more difficult without a welder to put a frame together but it's really not going to be that complicated so right now all i'm going to shoot for is a square that i can mount this to and then mount everything else to around that [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so now we have to stand for our soon-to-be gasifier reactor and i came across an interesting problem so first off this is going to be a completely different kind of gasifier from the one that you may have seen previously on the channel or even that you may have seen other places online and if you're not familiar with gasifiers at all i will explain it in detail or if you want to now go ahead and check out my other video to get a detailed explanation on what these things are and how they work but again this one is going to be quite a bit different it's what's called a cross draft gasifier so i'll put on screen now a diagram of what a cross draft gasifier reactor actually looks like and they're terribly simple which is why i've chosen to go with it for this no well design but you'll notice there is an air in on this side and there is a gas out on this side and while ordinarily with a welding project that wouldn't be too terribly difficult but because this is a curved surface getting a pipe through here maintaining structural integrity and a good seal would be terribly difficult while still making it look good of course what i've decided to do is because all of that matters is that you have an intake of air from the outside on one side and then an out of gas on the other a draw if you will which will go to the filter which we'll get to later but i can imitate those positions pretty easily by going through the smooth sided bottom let me show you what that looks like so this diagram might be a little difficult to understand it's a little bit messy but i think it gets the point across essentially we're going to be going through the bottom and again because we can't weld but we need airtight seals and also structural integrity i'm going to be using one and a quarter inch pipe flanges on both the top and the bottom and in between there'll be a simple hole cut in the bottom of the pressure pot and so where the gasification happens inside of this type of reactor is right here in the middle you can see we have a grate that encompasses the bottom and also off the side where there's a small graded capsule for the gas out so we have air in here the reaction happens around here and then ash gets sifted to the bottom so this is a passive shaker grate this is why these are really only typical for vehicles or a device where the generator is mounted on the gasifier unit frame as well so the vibrations can shake all the old ash down the nice part about these is that they can achieve very high temperatures and the higher the temperature the less uh contaminants you have in the gas and also the more effective the gasification the more efficient rather because you have all the insulation around it of the other biomass the reaction is actually happening right in the middle of this pot with all the fuel around it so this will be our only air in reaction happens here the great filters the ash and then we have our gas out and this will be again surrounded by a grate which will act like the burn shaker grate in the downdraft gas fire design and then the draw because we don't want crap falling down to the top of this we want a graded system as well here just to keep ash from going up our pipeline and i'm just going to do that by drilling some holes in the pipe and then capping off the end and we want to make sure to end those holes further up than from where the ash might accumulate so this whole grate will be removable and to clean it in between operations you'll just remove the lid pop the grate out it'll be resting on these hopefully angle iron brackets attach to the side and then you'll just scoop out the remnants and we will be doing some experiments because this is only a 5 gallon reactor it's a small scale but they do offer 10 gallon paint pressure pots so this could easily be upscaled and even converted into a downdraft design if you simply add a fire tube to the top a shaker grate here suspended from chains from the lid and fuel hopper on top of that but that's a whole different discussion anyway so that's what we're going to do now we're going to get each flange and each pipe as close to the opposite edge as we can bolt them in place with some more of that high temp sealer and i'll come back if i have any updates okay so i have everything dry fitted together and you can see we have a slight problem i'm not sure if the concavity in the bottom of this pressure pod is the result of years of usage or pressure or whether it's designed to be that way but either way it's causing us a problem because it's bringing these two closer together than they should be and i don't want to mess with the bottom of this pot so i'm going to take a simple route and i'm going to bend each one of these six inch by one and a quarter inch pipe nibbles now because i couldn't just weld these back together here's what i did i just took a slight pie cut out of the bottom of the pipe leaving a one inch wide piece in the back for support then i used some more of that handy dandy muffler sealant and i made a bracket pop riveted it in place with some steel pop rivets and that's really about it alright so now that these pipes are done i'm going to go ahead and drill the holes in the sides of this like you saw on the diagram for my gas out and nothing will need to be changed for this and then we can move on to the great insert that the fuel will actually sit on and burn on and for that now every pressure pot should have one of these it's just a can basically that sits inside of your pressure pot and this is what you actually put the paint in so you can remove it and clean it a lot easier than that but it's stainless steel which means it's perfect for resisting the temperatures and the corrosiveness of the gas that we'll be putting it through all right so we have our gas suction tube and then we have our air inlet tube and i thought i'd take this moment just to share my great plan so the grate will sit about two to two and a half inches off the bottom of the pot and there will be a hole cut out to slip this over so this will have a 90 degree elbow on the top but that will be hand tightened every time and when we need to remove the grate to clean out the ash from underneath we'll simply unscrew it remove it and lift the grate out so what i may have to do is oversize the hole and then add a small flashing that we can slip over the top essentially like a washer but we'll worry about that later i guess i didn't really need to explain i just wanted to use my punch okay so here's the plan i'm going to take our pot we know it needs to be four inches away from this wall here i'm going to take the closed sided bottom and also that four inch measurement is just from uh this being equidistant from the center of the pipe to the towards the inside to the center of the pipe towards the outside so we're going to take our pot here i'm going to take our ruler place it right where we want it then we're going to bring this four inches over and center it approximately over that pipe it doesn't need to be perfect i'm going to mark both sides where it intersects and also we're going to trace the outside of the pot along the bottom of the inner pot then you should be left with something like this and now i need to know the piece that we need to make is five inches tall and that'll put it just above this it doesn't really need to be any higher just to make room for as much fuel as possible and since the intake is on the side of this we don't need to worry about obstructing the top so you can see what we've done here now now i have a square and i'm going to make a straight line down to that five inch mark that we just discovered and you'll repeat that on both sides and here's where it gets interesting we're going to run a mark from that five inch mark from this five inch mark all across here using a tape measure and now we need to make another mark an inch down on either side another line across and that will be our cut line what we'll be doing with this material here is using it to cut ears to attach to our rest of our grate which you'll see in a minute and again this is the line that we'll be cutting on here and also cutting along here and so we can get all the cutting done at once go ahead and take your tape measure and your ruler and you're going to want to put a mark all the way around one inch up and then cut along that as well so you're left with the bottom pan with this sort of crescent moon shape out of it so i think you guys can take it from here i'm gonna go ahead and cut this out [Music] [Music] all right so this piece is almost done but obviously it's not a great yet it's just a solid piece of metal so what we have to do is now drill a grid of holes and basically every surface that you can there's no need to go way out here if you come maybe inch and a half in from the sides and then everything all the way up this upright and then on the upright and even on top so basically basically everything i like to do smaller and more so i'm going to be using a quarter inch drill bit for this i found that that works well and it also keeps the hole small enough that i can use something like wood pellets if i wanted to which is usually what i use for testing these so that's what i'm going to be doing so like i briefly mentioned earlier we needed to remove this gasket inside of this because it's not going to be rated for the kind of heat that we're going to be putting this under so to replace that rubber i'll be using fiberglass rope and this is just replacement gasketing that you can find at most hardware stores for wood stoves again withstands temperatures up to 2000 degrees fahrenheit and it fits perfectly into the gap around here and to secure it in place we'll be using gasketing cement and stove sealer which is basically just glue that's made for this exact purpose so i'm going to lay a bead in the bottom of this and then put my rope in place so with that gasket in place now our reactor is basically done a couple more things i'm going to do but for all intents and purposes we are complete so now we have our gas out here which i'm bringing this way because i don't want the filter elements to be on the same side as where the majority of the heat's going to be so you'll have a lot of insulation on the sides because there'll be fuel there so that is where we're going to want to put most of our workings to keep it cool as possible which is really the main goal because we have our gas produced but we need to make sure it's clean enough for our engine so we don't destroy it and that is where this cooling and filtering system that i'm about to show you comes into place first thing we're going to do is try to get as much heat out as we can so we can condense it bring those molecules closer together and then get all the tar and steam to condense back into their liquid form for that why not use something that's already designed to radiate heat from the inside this is an old oil heater one that i found for free in the junk pile and i think it'll work perfectly because it already has one and a quarter inch pipe threads in both sides for the heating element and i have a hunch that underneath this will be the exact same size bung so these are full of diathermic oil which is basically just some kind of highly refined mineral oil so you can dispose of that properly however you deem fit as long as it's responsible and there's really not a whole lot of hazard to using these so i'm gonna take my grinder i'm gonna grind down the top of this ridge and with any luck there'll be threads down there too so we have our reactor we have our condenser down here and we're going to put one more filter unit on here to get the gas as clean as possible and for that you're going to need a five gallon metal bucket specifically one the metal lid and some sort of locking hasp this one is just a hoop so we're going to be attaching this flange to the bottom of the bucket and then we'll be filling this with media and this will be upside down and that filter media which will most likely be something like wood shavings or some other fibrous media that'll trap any sort of particulates and hopefully get more tara out of the gas because that's really again our main enemy before it gets to the engine and we'll be attaching this to the bottom of the bucket drilling a hole the exact same way we did in our reactor and that is using our sealant and some 3 8 inch holes okay i'm realizing that we have a lot still to cover and not a lot of time to do it with how long this video is already getting and i still need to test this thing so really quick i'm going to do a recap or a quick sum up we have a reactor which you saw to build which is piped into our cooler which is going to get as much heat out as possible which is why it's in this orientation here to hopefully allow heat to go up and out and not up through the top of here like it would be in a standard oil heater orientation i'm trying to get rid of it as readily as possible and then out of that we have just a simple pipe going into a bucket in that bucket we'll be filled some medium that filters out any contaminants or at least as many contaminants as we can over there we have an air inlet which goes into the other side again you saw to build a reactor and i'll put a butterfly valve on that and i'm going to do some framework to put it all together but i think you have all the mechanical workings down except for one last thing so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to do this and then we're going to move on to the testing phase so when this is up and running the vacuum being pulled by the downstroke of the engine hold on is enough to pull air from there all the way through the system pulling gas with it keeping that combustion going cooling it down filtering and bring it to the engine but in the meantime we have to have a startup to get that gas up to the point where it can burn which means that a reactor needs to be up to temperature so to do that we actually have a blower that we're going to attach to this to take the place of the engine in the interim and that is going to attach straight to the top of this bucket this needs to be removable because we will be having to change the filter medium whenever it gets dirty essentially so this is the last step i'll be taking you guys along with so for the blower motor for this i'm going to be using this blower here which is actually from a vehicle and a specific vehicle this is from a 1997 toyota rav4 you want to go with something that's 12 volt so you can run this when power may not be available hence the point if i needed 120 volts to start my gas fire to create 120 volts that's a catch 22. but the reason why i'm going with this specific fan is because these 1997 toyota rav4 fans fit perfectly into a number 10 can so i'm actually going to construct the blower as follows this is going to sit right in the center of the top i'm going to cut a hole just big enough so it can suck air in and then on the side of this can which i'll cut down just deep enough for the top of this fan not to hit the top of the bucket and then out of the side i'll use another tin can i'll solder this all together and that includes soldering the can to the top of the lid that you want to make sure that all of your paints and finishes are off of all of your items before you try soldering it and make sure to use a plenty of soldering flux to make sure you get good seal because again keeping air out of our system where we don't want it is very important and i'll explain all that in a bit if it doesn't make sense quite yet again i apologize but i think showing the building process and then having the actual unit completed to go over will help you to better understand this in the long run so you're gonna have a fan you're gonna need a number 10 can and you're going to need a soup can that's really about it okay so the blower is mounted the soldering isn't perfect but it'll definitely hold and i will be putting a brace here to hold on to that hose which will be running to our generator or whatever engine we're running because obviously that's not going to be strong enough to hold on to all that wiggle so blower motor fits perfectly down into there pulls up through the media and this is an important point because things will still be condensing from the reactor at this point so having it mounted at an upward position where all of that can drain back into the media that can be replaced is something to take note of and also i lifted it up a little bit it'll keep this out of the way of the hasp unfortunately i'm running out of time for this project so i did end up borrowing uh the blower from my oil furnace so anyway if this looks different from the one you just saw me working on that's why it's still all soldered together and every one of these parts is a tin can so the rest is basically just bracing and framework and i will be putting a spigot on this radiator as well because this will be our main sort of condensate catcher especially since it's downstream from both things uh so we'll have tar creosote and water building up in this that'll need to be taken care of i'm gonna get that done and then you'll see it in the final product when i go over the whole explanation and that is really the gasifier no i just hope it works all right ladies and gentlemen the gas fire is done and we're just getting set up to test and i thought this would be the perfect opportunity to walk you through how the entire process works while this thing is completed so if you haven't seen my other video on wood gasification and even the word gas fire is completely new to you allow me to explain these devices are taking advantage of a process called gasification in which you can take any kind of organic biomass really anything natural that burns and by heating it up you're able to break it down through a process called pyrolysis to its basic elements when you do that you create a gas called syngas or wood gas or synthesis gas or whatever you want to call it and the gas is about 20 hydrogen 20 carbon monoxide 50 to 60 nitrogen and the rest is just remaining methane so again that's whenever you heat up biomass above i believe it's about 451 degrees fahrenheit and so the way we're taking advantage of that here is by burning material but not completely so we're burning in an oxygen improved environment and that flame the ignition of some of the material is enough to create heat and that heat which is sustained through just enough oxygen to not spread to ignite the gases produced by the heat interacting with the surrounding material is the process that we're using to create wood gas but basically small flame heating around it but not giving enough oxygen to burn and then those gases are then taken through this grate and then filtered through our system because in a perfect world those gases would be completely clean but unfortunately they contain things like water vapor from moisture content in the wood the process also creates tars and creosote and some other nasty stuff that we need to filter out and the main concern of getting that gas to be clean enough to run on an engine is by cooling it down and so underneath of this removable stainless steel grate there's a pipe as you saw that runs down and then through this repurposed radiator which the specific purpose of a radiator is to transfer heat from whatever's inside to whatever's outside aka the air so we're taking advantage of that by piping hot gas through this radiator where it'll cool down most of that crap the liquid stuff that's in vapor form because the heat will be condensed out and then we'll move into the bottom of this bucket which you just saw me fill with sawdust and that'll act as a further filter media to get any particulates because this will be essentially smoke coming out of here too and there's a lot of little things like suspended carbon that we need to get out again we want this to be broken down to just the gases and what we're really after is that hydrogen so as i said we don't want there to be enough oxygen to actually just burn all the material in there before we can extract the gases and so what we're doing is we're limiting that extremely by the use of just this here and this is a one-way valve it's a skate valve this doesn't need to be as long as it is but unfortunately it's the only piece of three-quarter inch pipe that i had but that one-way valve is important to prevent flashbacks and things because if too much oxygen gets in there then you'll mix up the stoichiometry which is the air fuel mixture and it can become flammable if you keep the system sealed enough to where it's just gas it won't have enough oxygen to combine into a combustible mix inside of this so that's the gas fire we're producing our gas in here by cramming this full of burning material and then sealing it up air goes in burns comes out filtered yadda yadda out the end of this hose and so this pipe will be connected first to a flare because we need to make sure that this is up to temperature and producing flammable gas before we risk putting it into our engine it simply won't run it and it could damage it by building up tires and stuff so i'll have a metal pipe on the end and we'll actually burn the gas coming out to make sure that it's burning nice and clean before hooking it up really we actually need to pre-carburete the fuel before it leads into our engine and i had a way i was going to do that using this valve here and my air intake but it didn't end up working so this is the traditional way that you would mix the gas in the air to get it to run in your generator inside of that gas fire like i said you do not want any stray oxygen and so when it gets to here there's not enough for it to combust inside of the engine so what you have to do is you have to mix in the proper amount by hand by using a valve setup just like this and at this point the gas is cool enough that you can use pvc pipe and valves because it's cheaper and you won't have any issues with melting so all you need to do is add a method of inputting your gas air mixture into your air intake specifically if you can on the outside of the air filter to add one final step of filtration before it gets into your engine this generator and this engine did not have an air cleaner cover so i had to make one but in your case you won't need to and i did weld that so full disclosure but just to prove i did solder this one inch fitting into this just to get my point across this is again a no weld project okay so we've loaded the reactor with wood and i've put some starter down in there which is just some cloth some paper and a sprinkle some wood pellets on top just to give it something small to start off with so what we're going to do now is we're going to pack this up with about as much as we can fit with leaving a spot in the center going to turn that on the fan that is and i'm going to ignite the center material we're going to make sure this tube is facing a safe direction so that we don't have gas going anywhere we don't want it wire is getting connected i'm not going to screw it down yet in case we have to reignite it but i'm going to let this sit for a minute until we have smoke coming out of our hose all right so this has been running for about 15 minutes i can feel the outside of this starting to get warm and the gas that's coming out is looking pretty good i have the end of the hose stuck into this metal pipe so that way when i'm igniting the flare it doesn't burn the end of the rubber simple as that and we're gonna go ahead and see if this ignites oh yeah yeah already now this is still not a very very clean flame i can do better than this i'm gonna let this get up to temperature and see if that goes away but all that orange that you see those are can hold on all that orange that you saw those were contaminants and those contaminants obviously they uh when heated give off an orange glow we are getting pretty dang close but i'd like that flame to be a little bit cleaner you'll notice this flame is actually burning a lot cleaner than the last time as well i think we've gotten rid of a lot of the water vapor and other contaminants by basically pre-burning it and being left which is mostly charcoal this time so i think we're ready to hook it up to the generator and see what happens [Applause] do [Applause] [Applause] so ladies and gentlemen you've seen how to build it now i hope you enjoyed this video and one thing i forgot to mention uh last gasifier video to shut down a gasifier all you need to do is shut off the blower because the system has very little airflow and that flapper valve will close this isn't going to get any air and it's going to die eventually and then what you'll be left with is a nice bed of charcoal to start the next burn whenever you're ready to fire up your generator in the future so for those of you out there who don't have a welder or maybe are already off grid but have access to some basic tools like this i hope you were able to find inspiration from this and if you did or if you have any questions then please let me know in the comment section down below so i hope i'm not forgetting anything but i think that's about it this information may be valuable soon so share this information with your friends download this video so you have it on hand and if you enjoyed watching this video as much as i enjoyed making it then don't forget to hit the like button and i'll see you guys in the next video bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Randomn

Views: 335,124

Rating: 4.943306 out of 5

Keywords: welder, welding, no-weld, gasifier, woodgas, generator, generation, generating, syngas, gas, fuel, petrol, engine, DIY, homemade, handmade, drill, angle grinder, prep, survival, power outage, how to, build, make, create, diesel, car, vehicle, FEMA, wood, biomass, without, built, made

Id: Bvl5XxVVjDM

Length: 31min 34sec (1894 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021