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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit suitehop.com today. Today on Radical Personal Finance, we mix it up and we talk about how to drive your car on wood. Yes, I mean it like the hard stuff that grows in the form of a tree, literally how to use wood to fuel your car.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me today. Indeed, we do mix it up today. I don't think this is your standard certified financial planner board of standards content, is it? But I think if it's Radical Personal Finance, not sure how much money is going to save you today.

But when gas prices increase in the future, who knows? Maybe the content of today's show can save you a few hundred bucks a month. Today, I've got Chris Sines and Wayne Keith on from driveonwood.com. And I think you can enjoy this interview. It's very different as far as the subject matter.

But it's the kind of stuff that I'm into. It was a suggestion from a listener that sent me over a link and I just thought it was a cool topic. And I frankly, this interview more than anything else is just me asking some cool guys questions that I thought would be fun.

And I hope you think it's fun too. These types of non-traditional, I guess, decisions, I think for a subset of you, not all of you, but for a subset of you, these types of non-traditional topics, I think might open up some doors for you. And if you think about it, US Americans spend more on their cars than many other categories of their budgets.

Now, I would imagine most of you have been enjoying the low gas prices. It's been kind of a nice and welcome change to most of our budgets. And I'm glad for that. But gas prices aren't going to stay low forever. And in the future, when they increase, it might be nice to have something like the content of today's show in your back pocket.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy being introduced to a topic that might someday save you a few hundred bucks a month in fuel costs. Chris and Wayne, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Thanks for having us. I've been excited to get you guys on and you were actually a recommendation by a listener.

And then I went and checked out some of your website and whatnot. And I guess, Wayne, I've seen some of your trucks. I don't remember where it was, whether it was in some kind of Backwoods Home type magazine or my YouTube browsings of weird technology. But you've got the fleet of trucks, right?

A little truck, big truck, and these farm trucks that you're using wood gas systems. And I realized, wait a second, I know your work. So whatever you're doing, it's good as far as getting popularity out there. I'm going to talk today about how to drive your car for free, right?

We're going to save people and tell them they never have to buy gasoline again and they're going to be able to drive every mile they want for free. Is that an accurate assessment of the opportunity of wood gas? Not exactly free. We add a little labor in with it.

It's okay. But there's no free lunches. Right. Hopefully, you heard the tongue in cheek there. So let's start with a simple introduction. How is it possible to use wood to power your vehicle and carry you down the road? Okay. Proper belief thinks the gasoline engine runs off gasoline. It doesn't.

It runs off gasoline vapors. And in short, we are taking a solid fuel, which is wood, and turning it into vapor and then feeding it to the motor. So that's a process called wood gasification, right? Gasification, that's correct. We're vaporizing a solid fuel and feeding it to the motor.

And the motor will run as if it was on LP or natural gas. It's being fed on vapor. So I'm a total newbie. So feel free to correct any technical thing that I get wrong. But what is the actual process like? If I wanted to bring my car or minivan to you and say, "Guys, could we figure out a way to where I don't need to run this thing on gasoline anymore?" What type of equipment do I need and how do I make that happen?

Some vehicles work better with this. It has to do with, to start with, you're going to lose some power in relation to gasoline. So to start with, we need a big motor because you're going to lose about 25 or 30% of your power. And this apparatus called a gasifier, we usually put it in the bed of the truck.

It takes up some room in the bed of the truck, about what a toolbox will usually take up in the back of the truck. The cost on this will depend on how well you are at scavenging around drums, old water heaters, and so forth that can be used to make this gasifier.

How did you guys get into this as a hobby? Okay, let me start first. Back in the '70s, during the oil embargo, at the time I was running a little welding shop doing a lot of tinkering. I started experimenting with it back in the '70s. And then a little while, we could get gas again.

The price went back down, so I forgot about it for the next 30 years. And back about 12 years ago, when gasoline started going up, I drew a line in the sand and said if gasoline ever makes it to the dollar and a half, I'm going to start experimenting with gasification.

And of course, gasoline did reach that mark. And I started experimenting again back in 2003, 2004, and everything just evolved from there. I got interested in gasification about seven years ago, I guess. I read an article in Mother Earth News, and somebody there had actually built one of these back in the '80s.

They actually published plans for it in Mother Earth News. At the time, I was researching a lot of different alternative energies, reading about solar power and wind power and steam and hydroelectric power and every kind of do-it-yourself off-grid technology because I was just interested in that sort of thing.

And wood gasification stood out to me as the only thing that I could actually make in my garage. You're not going to go out and build yourself a solar panel. You're not going to be able to machine a steam engine in your garage. It's not something that's within the scope of the average do-it-yourselfer.

So a gasifier seemed like the easiest thing I could do to get started with this stuff. So I was looking around online, and it seemed pretty scattered, the amount of info that was out there about these. There was a couple of old articles I found. There was occasional references to some guy in Alabama who had some trucks, being Wayne Keith.

So going on some very limited information, I started building a gasifier. I just kind of jumbled it together from a bunch of different designs that I found, and it didn't work very well. I mean, I got it finished. I did get it to run a truck down the road a little ways, but it was full of mistakes that I could have avoided if I had known any better.

So at some point, it was suggested to me that I go visit Wayne Keith and get a look at some of his trucks. And that was four years ago today, actually. We were down in Alabama, and he gave me a ride in some of his trucks. And I was completely floored.

I'd never seen anything that worked so well, that was homemade. But it actually moved down the road, and it was keeping up with traffic, and it operated perfectly smooth. I was very impressed. And it wasn't a couple of months later when the two of us ended up starting Drive on Wood.

And we now have a website where a lot of other people are able to build the same type of system. Chris, is this actually something that can save somebody money? Like if somebody wants to actually save money on their driving costs? Oh, definitely. If you're spending a lot of money on gasoline, it's something you can trade for labor making wood.

Now, the amount of labor versus the amount of cost is going to depend on what you were being paid in the first place. So you might think, Wayne has a good example, if you were thinking of how far you could get on an hour's worth of pay with gasoline.

Say you were being paid $20 an hour. Well, $20 right now will buy you about 10 gallons of gasoline, and that will get you a certain distance, maybe about 200 miles. If you can make more wood in that time by processing wood that you have sitting around, that you can find in your backyard, if you can spend that same time making wood fuel, then not only have you done something for yourself and reclaimed that time, but you will probably end up with more time left over because you're not trying to make the money to pay for the gasoline.

How much wood and time and equipment is actually required to create the wood fuel, and what is the actual fuel that you're creating and using? Go ahead, Wayne. Let me give you something to think about, Joshua. I paid for my farm by selling wood at $27 a cord, and that was delivered at the mill, which is about a 30-mile round trip.

So I can assume it was worth even less here on my farm. That wood's up a little bit now to probably $50 a cord, but that cord of wood would run my truck 5,000 miles. Wow. Also, I've got a little homemade sawmill that I work with part-time, and I use the slabs or the waste from the sawmill to run my truck.

A good day of sawing in mediocre timber, I'll have enough waste that I've got to do away with, enough that would run my truck to California and back in one day of waste. That's remarkable. Now there's got to be some labor involved. Like I said, there's no free lunches or free rides.

You've got to have some labor to process this wood. I made a homemade wood chunker, I call it, and I made it out of junk out of the junkyard, but I can run these sawmill slabs or sawmill waste through this piece of equipment. It chops them up into, I guess you could call it, bits of wood about the size of your fist or less, and that's what I feed into the gasifier.

Also, it takes a test we've done, it takes about 16 pounds of wood to carry the truck as far as a gallon of gasoline will. Interesting. Wayne, tell me about your trucks, because you've built some that are fast and some that haul a lot of weight. Tell me about your fleet and what you've been able to accomplish burning this fuel.

Okay, over the years, I think I've built about 14 or 15 trucks. I've also got a tractor now running off the wood. Built several little gasifiers to run small electric generators and so forth. For my over-the-road truck or traveling truck, I've got a medium-sized truck, a Dodge Dakota. It'll go on down the road pretty good.

I think I've got some videos on YouTube showing running about 95 or so for short distances. They run comfortable on the interstate between 60 and 70 miles an hour, but for short distances, you'll even have more speed than that. I've also got a work truck. It's a V10 Ram Dodge.

Four-wheel drive is my work truck. It's about a 9,000-pound truck, but I use it for farming, pulling trailers, hay trailers, cattle trailers. I even haul hay in the bed up next to the gasifier, and it works good. The best I can figure, I've driven somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 miles now on wood.

I made one cross-country trip that was 7,400 miles strictly on wood. Also, I may be one of the few that's ever had speeding tickets on wood, but I'm guilty of a 75 and a 55, shows up each time I have to pay my insurance also. The cop wasn't merciful to you after he explained what you were doing?

The trooper had no idea that I was using wood. The truck just don't stand out that much. He don't know that he's probably the only police in the United States that's ever given a wood gas speeding ticket. If somebody has wood, this sounds like a really cool, they have access to wood.

It sounds like a really cool thing. Yeah, this is not for everybody. If you're having to be out looking for wood, it may not fit your lifestyle, but if you've got wood, looking for some way to get rid of the wood, it fits in perfectly. It's kind of like a ship captain, sea captain, or whatever that learns his engines run on seawater.

He's got it made. But if you're out in the desert somewhere, that's not going to help you out any. But if you've got wood, and don't mind getting your hands dirty, it's a cheap ride. It's not a free ride, but it's about as cheap a ride as you'll ever find.

Have you guys seen some significant improvements in the technology, especially you, Wayne, after building all these trucks? Are you getting them much better and much more efficient, and do you feel like there is a lot of room to improve still? We would like to. Now, we didn't invent the gasification process.

It's an old process that was used back in World War II. We would like to think we have improved it a little bit. Back in World War II, if you're going down the roads at 35, 40 miles an hour, you might be considered driving fast. But nowadays, with these gasifiers, you can get on the interstate highway, stay right with the stream of traffic running 70, 75 miles an hour.

Nobody even notices you. Is wood gas superior to things like, I don't know, building a still and creating alcohol fuel? Is it comparable to some of these other alternative sources, or how would you compare it to other fuel options other than gasoline? Go ahead, Chris. I think you've studied that more than I.

Like I said before, I've looked into doing a lot of different kinds of homemade fuel, trying to figure out the cost and benefit of doing homemade alcohol and homemade steam engines and things like that. What it turns out is when you go to convert energy from one form into the other, a lot of times you lose most of it along the way.

For example, if you're going to make ethanol, everybody knows ethanol is more or less a boondoggle. But even at home, you can make it, but think of what you've got to do. You've got to grow a whole bunch of starch crops such as corn, potatoes, etc. You've got to harvest all that.

You've got to ferment it, which you lose a certain amount of energy from that conversion. Then you've got to boil it down considerably. Once it's been fermented into beer, you've got to ferment it down and concentrate the alcohol. That distillation process takes a lot of energy, which is wasted.

It's not going into fueling the vehicle. It's just going to boil off water. By the end of the day, the fuel value that you started with is reduced into a very useful but much reduced amount of energy. The unique thing about wood gas is that you can actually take a piece of wood that's a very low, it's very raw.

It hasn't been highly processed. As much as we've processed it is to cut it up into little pieces. You can directly fuel an engine with it. You put it in the gasifier, you get gas out, the gas makes the engine go. Efficiency-wise, we're talking three or four times as efficient as taking the same wood and putting it through some type of cellulosic ethanol process.

Not to mention the fact that you can build one of these gasifiers yourself and you don't have to have a giant industrial factory to make all these chemical modifications. What would be the... Go ahead, Wayne. Joshua? We did a test at Auburn University on the efficiency. We tried the vehicle on gasoline.

A million BTUs of gasoline got us Dodge Dakota 168 miles. Then we tried it with a million BTUs of wood and it got the truck 231 miles. We analyzed all the wood, sent it to the lab, got the BTU values and et cetera. Long story short, burning wood in the truck was 37% more efficient than gasoline in the truck was...

The engine is designed to run on gasoline. So 37% more efficient burning wood scraps, sawmill scraps, than it is gasoline imported across all the way, both sides of the world. So are you aware that this is carbon neutral? Net carbon neutral. My friend, Dr. David Bransby at Auburn University says this truck is 67% cleaner than a total electric vehicle if that vehicle is charged on the Alabama grid.

Wow. I love that. That's awesome. How much volume is... Let's say I wanted a million BTUs of wood, I'm going to go 200 and something miles on that. How much physical volume of wood chunks would I need to put through the gasifier in order to be able to cover that distance?

200 miles, you'd want about almost 200 pounds of wood. This Dodge Dakota I'm driving, it gets about a mile and a quarter or a mile and a third per pound of wood. So putting that into something like five gallon buckets that I can relate to, how many buckets or barrels of wood is that to go 200 miles?

I use sacks, plastic bags. I usually have about 15 pounds of wood per bag. You can do the math. It'll take up...our hoppers, our reservoirs on the gasifier are built to take one of these Dakotas almost 100 miles. The best I've done is about 107 miles pulling a small trotter, but assume somewhere around 100 miles.

So you fill up your hopper and then you can carry along a few extra bags of wood with you as you go. Let me jump in here and give you a couple more visualizations. A pound of wood is more or less a double handful. So if you had a bunch of wood chips or wood chunks, if you took about what you can hold in two hands, that's more or less a pound, probably a little more.

I believe a five gallon bucket will be about 10 pounds. I haven't weighed it. It's going to depend on the species. Some wood is obviously heavier than others. You get softwoods and hardwoods. So that's why we mostly go by the pound measurement. Moisture content is also going to be a factor.

If you have real wet wood, it's going to take more of that energy to boil the water out. So you'll get less energy and you also have more pounds. So that kind of screws with your measurements there. But if you have dry wood, then it will definitely go about a mile per pound.

Wayne, when you drove... Josh? Yeah, go ahead. So keep in mind, we don't worry about running out of wood. We can switch to gasoline about as fast as you can blink your eye. So we don't worry about running out. That's not a problem. So you just keep a tank of gasoline in the car and then you have a fuel switch where you switch to the tank when you need to?

I usually keep about a quarter of a tank in the truck just for emergency situations. That quarter of a tank might do me months, but I do keep a quarter in there. But you don't have to worry about running in. You just flip the switch and you're back on gasoline just like everybody else.

Wayne, when you drove 7,400 miles across the country, how did you get your hands on the wood that you needed to put in your car? Had several sponsors going out there and back. I had some partners that went with me. They had called ahead to places like furniture shops and so forth that had waste.

We would stop along the way and hit their dumpsters. I know we stopped in, I believe it was Lubbock, Texas, and hit one of their dumpsters. I think they built cabinets or something like that. Just one dumpster would have fueled us all the way out there and back. We just got one out of five that had parked there.

That's cool. For people who are traveling, years ago I ran across some of these people who burn waste veggie oil in their buses or RVs or things. I found this group of guys who had bought a Japanese fire engine, diesel-running fire engine, converted it to run on waste vegetable oil, and traveled from at least Alaska to Panama if not down through South America.

I don't remember, and I don't remember the name of the blog, but did the entire trip on waste vegetable oil. They burned French fry oil in the United States. They burned palm oil in Central America. It's such a cool concept. Obviously a lot of work, but such a cool concept to be able to take waste products and turn them into something useful.

The ability to move your vehicle across the country. It's amazing. Right. At one time, I think that process worked pretty good, but I think a lot of your restaurants and so forth that had that oil, they've learned that it's a commodity now and it's a lot harder to find it.

I know people around here that once did the cooking oil deal, but they pretty much had to stop that. But wood's about the same price it's ever been, maybe cheaper now. I was going to say, we found an inefficient market with lots of wood scraps available. Couple more questions.

How does it actually work? As far as what does a wood gasifier do and how does it work? What does it look like inside of it and how do you get wood into the engine? Let me give you the short version here. When you burn biomass in an oxygen-restricted environment, the products are going to be carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Now, if you heat these products up to somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees and run them through red-hot charcoal, you'll get a thermochemical reaction, which will turn these products into hydrogen, CO, and methane. It's the gas that runs the motor. To really understand what's going on, you'd probably need chemistry how the charcoal will strip oxygen atoms from the CO2 and the H2O.

Chris can probably explain the science behind it better than I can. I just know how to make them run. I don't claim to know all the science behind them. Let me run one more of these visualizations by you. If you just took a big old knife and you sliced a gasifier right down the center so you can see a cross-section of it, at the very top you'd have a lid.

For about the first half of it, you'll have what we call a hopper. That's where the wood sits that hasn't been burned up yet. That's what you refill when it gets low. As long as you keep putting wood in there, it'll run indefinitely. About the halfway point is where it will start converting into charcoal.

You'll have some wood that's partly burnt, and then below that you'll have wood that's completely converted into charcoal. The charcoal is what does all the hard work. It gets hot, and as it heats up the wood above it, the wood releases vapors. They're called pyrolysis gases. The gases are consumed by the incoming oxygen from the nozzles.

You've actually burned up all of those initial gases, and you created carbon dioxide, and you got some water vapor. You take those gases and you put them through this hot charcoal bed. As they go through the hot charcoal bed, like Wayne was saying, the carbon reacts with the water vapor and the carbon dioxide, and you get carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas and a little bit of methane.

Those are all flammable gases. That process continues all the way through the charcoal until it comes out the bottom. At the very bottom of the gasifier, you've got a grate, which is just a flat plate with some holes in it to let the little bits of charcoal and dust fall through.

Then the gas will come back up around the side and then go out to the filtration and the cooling and on into the motor. Mad Fientist: Can you build a generator that runs off of wood gas to power something like an off-grid generator situation to charge the battery bank for your house?

Wayne Henson: Certainly. Mad Fientist: Is it economical and efficient to do that? Wayne Henson: I would say it's actually an even better use for somebody who's in that situation that's got a lot of wood. If you're already heating your house with wood, for example, it would be a perfect fit for a rural type situation.

You're going to need a fair amount of wood if you want to make a lot of electricity. For every gallon of gas that you would've burned in that generator, you've got to come up with 16 pounds of fuel wood. This is not going to power your high electricity demand, yuppie lifestyle with lots of high electric home heating and electric dryers and electric this and that.

You're going to have to tone it down a little bit. But the type of person who would be doing that is already looking at that from solar and wind power. So if you're already reducing your electrical needs, then it'll be a great fit. It's definitely good for a secondary generator to go along with a solar setup or primary use.

If you've got a decent battery bank, you should have no trouble with that. Joshua, I failed to mention when we made our cross country trip, took a little electric generator, electric power tools, saws and so forth. We would stop and gather wood, if we find dead or dry wood along the way.

We had this generator hooked up to the truck gasifier. We would run the generator to run the power tools to process your wood to go on our way. I've been all the way across the United States. I couldn't take everybody for a ride, but we would stop and hook this generator up to the truck.

The generator didn't have a gas tank on it. I'd remove the gas tank to show them the generator was running off of wood to do these chores, run the power tools, et cetera. Also on our website, we have a lot of folks that live off grid, and they're using this process using the gasification to run the generator to keep batteries charged and et cetera.

Mad Fientist: With somebody who has average capabilities, and they're working with some of your good plans, and they have average fabrication capabilities, and they want to build a unit to power a Dodge Dakota, an older Dakota, what kind of guesses do you have as far as how much the parts cost and how much time is going to be required to build something that can power a small pickup truck?

Tom Hickson: The best we can figure, labor-wise, if you make it look real nice, it's labor-intensive. It takes me 250 hours to build one, but the trucks look nice. I can park in Walmart's parking lot and never get eyebrow-raised out there. They just don't notice. They just blend in with them, but it takes me 250 hours to build one.

As far as materials, if you can look out for salvage yards and so forth to get your materials, you can come up with $500 or near that. If you're having to buy them on retail and so forth, you can look closer to $1,000. I'm guessing somewhere between $500 and $1,000 for material and 250 hours for your labor.

Tom Hickson Wayne, how old are you? Wayne Hines I'm 67. Tom Hickson Are you thinking about retiring, or is this going to be something you're going to keep doing? Wayne Hines I'll keep doing it as long as I can. It's nice to tell folks that I've got enough motor fuel to do the rest of my life, but that's the situation I'm in right now.

The amount of wood I've got piled up. Tom Hickson That's awesome. Chris, how about you? What are your plans for this project, this new website and things like that? Do you have anything specific, or are you just trying to promote an enthusiast's community so that the technology can be advanced?

Chris Steele Well, certainly that. I have some ideas. I'd like to start building some of these smaller generator style units and see if people are interested in those. We've built plenty of trucks now, so those are out there. People can probably find those used, but the Keith style gasifier hasn't been done to a small generator very often.

Just building a small one geared towards that. So I'm going to explore that a little bit. We'll continue to do the website. We've got a pretty sizable community where people have been passing notes back and forth about how their experiences have been, what modifications they've come up with, and all sorts of interesting new ideas and techniques.

There's a lot of good community at the website now. Tom Hickson Awesome. So the website is driveonwood.com. We have some information there. There's plenty of things on YouTube. Anywhere else that you'd like people to check out your work or anything that you'd like to for people who are just having an introduction to the idea of wood gas?

Is there anything else you'd like to share with the listening audience? Chris Steele There's a lot on YouTube. They can just punch Wayne Keith YouTube. I've got a lot of videos showing me working. I've got a farm tractor that runs off of wood, and I've had several trucks showing them going down the road, cross-country, doing farm work, and et cetera.

Tom Hickson Chris, how about you? Anything else that you'd like people to know about? Chris Steele I think we've got pretty much everything that we can come up with related to wood gas. I've put a lot of information into the library section. So if you go on the website and you click on library, that'll take you.

There's a lot of PDFs of the research that's been done and information about pretty much as detailed as you want to get. It's all there. But if your listeners are interested in checking this out, we encourage everybody to sign up on the forum, make a couple of posts, ask some questions, do some reading, and you'll find a lot of very knowledgeable people that are willing to help you out.

Tom Hickson Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the show.