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Old 10-29-2010, 02:51 PM   #13 (permalink)
gasman
EcoModding Lurker
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: SE US
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Unfortunately, I'm with Ryland. You'll be far (far far ad infinitum) better off just taking out the old engine and buying a steam one or starting from scratch with plans for a purpose-built steam engine.

I started my quest to make my truck fossil-fuel free by looking into steam. Safety and engineering aspects of it made it not worth the effort. There is a whole heck of a lot of work to to do make it work. Even if you get the original engine converted, you'll still have safety and power issues. It will be a vehicle that technically runs, but is weak and inefficient. And to get a purpose-built steam engine to work with whats left of your drive train would be an engineering and machining feat in itself. It only took me a couple hours to scrap the idea entirely.

The only advantage over a gasifier would be using pretty much any fuel in any size I wanted. So I finally settled on modifying gasifier designs to match my needs. My major hurdle is making the gasifier work well with my fuel size (regular split wood). I've all but given up making the wood a standard gasifier size, so I'm now on to modifying the burn chamber fit the split wood. I started a thread here. Good luck!
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