Charcol powered motorbike

This is a bit of a blast from the past, but it is a good lesson on how people get around shortages of anything including petrol. I had heard of tractors and cars running on wood gas but who would have thought that charcol made a clean energy source which could power up the little engines that make life worthwhile? He gets the range and the speed it doesn't go into much detail but it is basically a hopper filled with charcol a fire at the bottom, the gas gets filtered through the charcoal, and mabey another filter for a bit of extra clean burn and then straight into the engine.

a reply to: anonentity

You do realize how much lump charcoal is 12 pounds? I would estimate around 10 gallons of volume. It weighs very little. I don't see that motorcycle holding that much and that paper bag probably is only half a pound at most.

Also it would probably take around 200 pounds of wood to make that 12 pounds of coal. I make lump coal with unwanted trees in the yard. I then cook with it on a grill.

You don't get any gas off lump coal. That is what burns off when you make it. You basically bake it in a container with very limited oxygen. It is pretty much pure carbon.

Trees don't grow fast enough to sustain these as a fuel.

a reply to: anonentity
The Soviets used to run some pretty huge trucks on wood gas-not sure they were very clean in terms of emissions though.
NY times,1938-

Large-scale the production of an ingenious type of autotruck that generates its own gas from wood picked up as it goes along has been ordered by Soviet authorities as the result of a successful test run for such vehicles that ended at Moscow yesterday.

www.nytimes.com...

I wonder if any survived and made it to Ukraine-they have certainly used weapons from the same era!

One of the Youtubers I watch covers China related topics,and in one vid they were talking about how North Korea still uses similar vehicles,and can sometimes be seen from over the river in China hauling lumber.

I bet with todays technology we could make a much cleaner and more efficient version-but really there is no reason we couldn't all be using water powered cars with zero emissions.
Those exist as well,but have been surpressed.

a reply to: beyondknowledge

Well you are getting the wood gas while you are making the charcoal. Then the charcoal could be pressed into a denser form like the charcoal rods in normal batteries or brushes for electric motors. But He is basically getting around on the cost of a bag of barbecue charcoal. Which is pretty clever .

It's just astonishing that the engine is completely homemade. Moreover, building such a thing in four years must have been quite an adventure.While steampunk motorbikes don't come in plenty, it is even rarer to see one with a homemade steam engine that runs on coal. It would be a hot ride to use that thing!

a reply to: johnykmanus


This one is a nice one.