Gas Producer

The donor provided the following information: 'Gas producers were vital during the second world war as a means of providing fuel for vehicles.
'Gas producers were vital during the second world war as a means of providing fuel for vehicles.
The item that I have donated is a charcoal gas producer which my father used on a Ford V8 pilot car. My father and I could go to Perth and back from Kojonup on a bag and a half of charcoal, providing the charcoal gas producer was full before we left.
My father and I used to make the charcoal on our farm ‘Brookvale’. We chopped down jarrah trees and carted it to the pit using horses and a lorry.
We had a pit which was four foot by four foot by twelve foot long. We put dry jarrah into the pit and then lit it and let it burn for about two hours before we covered the pit with tin and then put sand on top of the tin to stop the wood from continuing to burn.
We covered the pit in the evening and then the next morning about ten o’clock we would take the sand and tin off and then shovelled the charcoal into a screen to split the charcoal into coarse and fine charcoal. We shovelled the charcoal into hessian bags and sold the fine and coarse charcoal for two shillings and six pence a bag.
The coarse charcoal was used in gas producers like ours. Joe O’Rourke used our charcoal in the school buses, as did the Kojonup Power Station and the Commercial Hotel.
The Ford pilot car was converted to run on petrol or charcoal, one carburettor sat on top of the other.
Pedericks from Wagin were very good manufacturers of gas charcoal producers due to their draft system. They sent their gas producers to businesses in Melbourne.
I think that during the second world war petrol was rationed to eight gallons every two months, some people in the district did not have gas producers but used petrol vehicles.'