Wood-Powered Pickup

Wood-Powered Pickup PICKUPS Miscellaneous 28-4-24 In the early 1980's, I was a staff writer with The Farmer magazine in St. Paul, Minn. Gas prices were sky-high at the time so my editor sent me out to interview a farmer who had converted his pickup to run on wood. Albert Smith, now deceased, was a 66-year old farmer when he built the wood-powered pickup. He and a friend, Eldon Fetterly, had discussed building such a unit for several years. When another friend gave him a book on the subject published in Sweden during World War II, he got started. "We didn't know where to start until we got the book," he told me at the time. Even then it wasn't easy. Neither he nor anyone he knew read Swedish. With the help of a Swedish-English dictionary, he translated the entire book, one word at a time. Only then could he master the various graphs and diagrams that described units that had been built. The job was made even more difficult by the absence of exact dimensions. Working only from diagrams of gasification units, Smith had to estimate how to size one specifically for the 360 cu. in. V-8 in his 1969 Ford 1/2-ton pickup. "The size of the cone part of the combustion chamber must conform to the volume of the engine," he said. "It is important to build the size of the generator to match the engine and type of driving to be done." He built his 350-lb. gasifier out of 14 and 16-ga. steel and sized it for country road driving. Wood was dumped into a 15 1/2-in. sq. compartment above a combustion chamber. Small wood blocks for fuel slid through the combustion chamber emerging as charcoal at the bottom of a cone-shaped compartment ending in a grill. The entire set of compartments was enclosed in a steel shell. Methane gas given off by the burning charcoal gathered at the top of the shell to be pumped off to a series of cooling units before being piped to the pickup's carburetor. Smith took me for a ride in the truck, travelling down country roads at a comfortable 40 to 50 mph. Building up enough wood gas took time (about 10 min.), however, since the combustion chamber needed to reach 800 to 1200 degrees. "It has to get hot enough to break down the tars and acetic acid in the wood," he explained to me. "The hotter the fire, the better the quantity and quality of the gas." Today Smith is gone, but his wood-powered pickup can still be seen at the Fillmore County History Center in Fountain, Minn. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Fillmore County History Center, 202 County Road 8, Fountain, Minn. 55935 (ph 507 268-4449; email: fillmorehistory@earthlink.net).

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