Zombie Apocalypse? You Can Still Run Your Motorcycle on Wood Gas!

When zombies are shuffling all across the landscape it probably won’t be long before leftover gasoline begins to disappear, then what? Well, you could park your sidecar rig and start walking, or you could go the flex fuel route and run it on wood gas. That’s what they did in WWII and that’s what this guy did over in Russia.

On what looks to be a pretty well used Ural, he mashed together a lot of basic raw materials like an old milk can, some steel pipe and a bit of angle iron into a functional wood gas generator. Nothing high tech here, this is about as basic as it gets, but it works.

Wood gas, or “producer gas,” is the result of incomplete combustion of carbon materials like wood or charcoal. The gas given off consists of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane, among the combustible components, the rest being primarily nitrogen. Feed the gas into your engine and off you go.

Of course, you need the gas generator on the vehicle and a supply of wood or whatever other carbon source you’re using so it’s pretty bulky. The power is low, but the engine will run which may mean the difference between living another day or being overrun by the undead.