As expected winter is with us and the prospect of same inspired us to do a little 'forward planning' in anticipation. We have a lot of good firewood in the trees around the place - three generations going on four - so we decided we would acquire a wood chipper for making mulch and yes, fuel.
Here are some pictures of the furnace we just completed for burning wood chips. |
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| One electric motor drives the compressor (The forced air makes a fire hot enough to make a clinker out of the wood chips!) and the gear and sprocket reduction down to .17 RPM to drive the 8" auger. |
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The hopper is the hood off an open flame stove we built earlier - not everything we concoct is a resounding success!
There was a need to prevent bridging. This ugly (below) is rotated by the flighting. |
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| The auger is from a combine problem we had. The bushing is from the grain elevator we repaired at the same time. The home made coupling - 1" to 1 1/4" - provides a little flex to the drive line. |
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| We thought we should suck more heat out of the system so we constructed this manifold with a duct fan. It blows through pipes as seen below. |
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| Son Darren starts it up with oil soaked chips. |
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