ive talked to wayne personally, hes a great guy, the way his set up works is keep the hopper full of wood or junk and hes used dead animals and plastic and all sorts of other biomass, and when it gets low the temp goes up and he fills back up. hes said about 1-2lb of wood per mile, and when he shuts the truck off, with the right design it just simply suffocates itself. if you come back and try to start it within a certain period of time the fire is hot enough to start up without a torch or lighting it. the reason im not doing woodgas is the bronco doesnt have a lot of room for it, bumper gasifiers have been done, but im sort of looking for something a bit smaller. the reason its large is for large engines and the fact that wood has a relatively low energy content to hydrocarbons. that being said, if you take a "system" that can convert hydrocarbons into a syngas like waynes truck does to solid wastes, then you can feed that to the engine. ive looked into various ways of doing this and im not going to pretend like mine will work or is the best solution. but i definitely dont want tailpipe smoke from just dumping oil into the cylinder and hoping it burns. i need that hydrocarbon waste to get hot enough to smoke, possibly even burn for a brief period of time, but not to the point all the energy is gone, and it will make a flammable smoke like waynes wood gasifier. that smoke will burn in the engine cleanly. thats what im trying to do. one guy who has sort of done this is "marcello bartollotta" hes on youtube and has a set up that works similar to what im going to attempt to do. he hasnt done it on a large engine yet
he has used wmo as fuel with a small amount of gas in his generators and it burns clean
ive talked to him aswell, hes a cool guy very honest, and trying to share with others and turn his system into a decent living. he uses exhaust heat to vaporize hydrocarbons for flammable vapor and his system does burn clean. i wont lie about my results and will have videos to come. i just hope my final outcome is: start up/shut down on gasoline/e85/something clean burning, and switch over to just about anything flammable even heavy oil wastes and be able to drive without putting out a bunch of smoke. and having something that isnt huge in the back of my truck.
and yes i do like those 4bt's, great engines. i might have to think more along the lines of 7.3 just because of the ease of swapping and my transmission and transfer case.