to the long running pursuit of slow speed, big flywheel, run forever inexpensive engines, a new (old) one has recently been added. this is the redstone diesel.
after many years of not complete pleasure with the quality of listeroids and changfas, this is what joel koch and george utterbach, the gurus of slow speed diy engines, are now pursuing. you can read about the details here:
http://www.utterpower.com/Redstone.htm
http://www.woodnstuff.ca/redstone.html
i think we would all do ourselves well if we came up with a small engine that was optimized for woodgas. high compression, but still spark ignition, as dual fuelling is somewhat unsatisfying.
i have been looking to the changfa to do this. thus the gasifier genset skid we made from a changfa (well, really a flying fish). see here:
http://allpowerlabs.org/gasification...inadiesel.html
while this is a workable solution, and one that is important for the dev world as these changfas are everywhere, the changfa engine is a bit clanky.
the redstone looks like a better contender for the custom wood gas engine prize. it is direct injection, with good access to the cylinder, so installing a spark plug in place of the injector looks doable. there are nice mount points to take a timing signal off the flywheel to run a magneto or coil. at 15.5:1 compression, it is already about the opimal compression for a spark ignition syngas engine. might have to lower that slightly, but the elimination of the injector body and spark plug replacement might do this anyway.
someone should get one of these from joel and figure out the solution. there hasn't been a production engine optimzed for wood gas made since the 40s i believe.
jim
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