2008-01-02

The company I worked for only needed the wood gas car for a limited time. They decided to give it to me as a gift. Hurray!! So now I “only” have to transport it home to Sweden.

Now the problem was that we didn’t save the carburettor or the vacuum housings when converting it to wood gas. I tried to find a carburettor in England but there wasn’t a single scrap yard that had one. They said that carburettors were passé. I told them that they were worth their price in gold but they wouldn’t believe me.

So why do I need a carburettor when I have a perfectly working wood gas system? Well, I doubt that they would let a wood gas car aboard the ferry with a smoking producer on the pickup. And it wouldn’t be nice to start the system inside the boat when it arrives, poisoning the passengers.

The problem had to be solved, and I went out to the forest in Furudal to see if there was something in the fauna. I found exactly what I needed, an old Volvo with a nice carburettor. It took quite a while in the freezing snow, but at last I got it out.

To be able to take it with me on the airplane I had to clean it from all gasoline. First I disassembled it and gave it a bath of degreasing agent. I then went through it with compressed air and gave it a new bath. At last I repeated the same sequence but with ethanol and then dried it. Now it looks like new and it’s completely free from gasoline!

I made an adapter to make it fit on the Toyota engine. Or actually it fits on the wood gas throttle valve that is mounted on the engine. I don’t know which valve I’m going to use fore throttling yet.
Using the wood gas throttle will make the installation easier but using the carburettor valve will probably give a better idling performance.

To be sure that the carburettor gets the right fuel pressure I bought an electric fuel pump. The gasoline tank was removed from the car, so I made a connection that would fit on a jeep jerry can. I put it all together to an easy-to-assemble kit and I’m hoping that it will take a maximum of 30 minutes to install and get the car running.

/Johan