Just read this thread for the first time. A couple of thoughts...
I'm pretty sure that a Fisher Panda uses the same
Kubota engine as that which was used in the Hackey's generator, which IIRC they bought from
Next Generation Power Engineering.
(Personally, I prefer the design of the NextGen unit over the FP for various reasons, and I believe the NextGen is half the price. For one thing, the NextGen uses the
Markon Alternator, which is a sweet alternator.)
Kubota does make some of their small diesel engines with turbochargers (though not the *really* small ones - like the EA series). Still, it should be no big deal to have NextGen whip up a genset using a Kubota engine with a turbo - the smallest of which appears to be the BG/O3-M Series, which is a 35hp unit as opposed to the 7hp unit in the NextGen and FP - driving some suitable alternator:
http://www.kubotaengine.com/assets/documents/BG Full Line.pdf
It may even be possible to just buy one of the Kubota brand gensets with a turbo, but I don't find that mentioned in any of the product literature:
http://www.kubotaengine.com/products/generators/gl-series
For completeness sake...
Eric Badger pulled off a neat high-altitude hack for his diesel stove:
"The stove was clearly designed for operation at sea-level and thus the mixture was almost always going to be too rich for where we are. The follow-on model of stove has accommodation for a switch to run at higher altitude, but that is a significant investment. A bit of investigation revealed that one of the potentiometers (R13) on our stove control board was the mixture control, adjusting the periodicity of the fuel pump strokes. As set from the factory it was 69k ohms and yielded 44 pump strokes per minute at full, while 87k yielded a 5000ft friendly 38 stokes per minute. We removed the potentiometer and replaced it with a fixed 70k resistor plus a dial potentiometer calibrated to altitude settings where we dial in altitude before firing up the stove."
http://www.badgertrek.com/sportsmobile/appliances.shtml
[EDIT: Forgot to mention, it should be possible to tie in a barometric pressure sensor and automate the adjustment.]
It's still just leaning out the mixture of course, and no doubt Charlie's Unicat Webasto hack would achieve the same thing in a similar fashion. What I like both about the Badger Hack and the Unicat Hack is that they are variable rate, rather than two fixed rates which you get with the dual pump setup.
Of course, there's gotta be some limit, so who knows if either the stove or the heater would work at 15k' when they've been leaned out to a fuel/air ratio in the parts per billion range...
