Smoke frome smokestacks

Smoke from any applicable building is nice.

Smoke units will be very hot so watch what they can touch.

Other than that, Press on.

Im constantly trying to think of cool places to jam a smoke unit. A smoking camp fire? Great idea. Never saw one on a layout yet. Sure would be a unique effect. Shouldn't be to hard. 

I also have some uses for some smoke- what is recommended, pro's & cons, can you make one yourself or only buy commercial?

Pro's- scented smoke, realism, and fun

Cons- scented smoke, filling fluid, buying fluid, cleaning up any fluid messes(oops), and one more thing to fail. Some claim "burnt" smoke fluid mist eventually soaks into the everything on the layout, changing the colors of things.

Recommending one unit to cover everything best is impossible. Best to ask again for each application.   

You could make one if you can find the right wire and a good insulator, but its likely easier & safer to use a prefabbed unit, and carefully modify it if you have to. For the fire pit, a Seuthe style smoke unit would work great. No fan, low heat models are available(Seuthe units use Seuthe fluid. DO NOT USE OTHER FLUIDS in them)(Do not use non-Seuthe fluid in a Seuthe). Seuthe units aren't big smokers, but can be very small units.(used more in HO/N scale, some about the size of a Bic pens cap) A "Smoke Bulb"(special "hot" bulb with a dimple or added fluid reservoir could be another option. Most PW elements are special heatable wire looped around ceramic or around fiber board. Or a resistor that gets very hot. The elements and resistors need a reservoir and wicking to bring the fluid to the heat. Mostly air is pumped through by a piston, but by itself would "float" the smoke well enough for the 4-4-0 American(the General), well enough for a small fire too. The modern fan driven ones normally perform great, and the fan could be made to run the air at a slower rate than from a running train

.   

It would be safer to just stick some cotton in the stack and pull and stretch it out to a wispy shape.

.....

Dennis

One way to provide more than one building is a fan driven smoke unit with some piping.  One of the guys for our modular club has a campfire and a cabin with smoke on his module, and he supplies them from a common smoke unit.  I have a building with multiple smokestacks with one fan driven smoke unit to supply them.

For the ultimate here, you can take a standard fan driven smoke unit and graft a large reservoir at the same level as the bowl to minimize refill issues and allow long run times.

probably could make one, just a flickering dc circuit. but the commercial ones flicker at uneven rates like a real fire would,  not sure how to control a 555 chip to be 'erratic' output

i think i only spent fifteen dollars on mine, it is in the picture and is the think the 'hobos' are sitting around, and it did work quite well.

i drilled a hole in the board 3/4" then built a little plywood holder for the circuit board with the two led led into hole, lined hole with aluminum foil and added some amber/orange clear acetate, crinkled.  looked and worked quite well,  rather proud of the effect it had on my grand sons.  their eyes got big and bigger as i turned on each special effect

here is one of them, and i had total of four miller engineering platforms

miller engineering sells a metal framework that duplicates what these billboards all sat upon,  they do a nice job

do not have a photo of it moving but the leds all make it quite visually attractive

For flickering fires, I use the LED's from the flickering tea candles, they make a very realistic pseudo-random flickering fire effect.  They work great for a real flickering firebox on steamers, much better than the boring light bulb that many have.

I buy the tea lights at Dollar stores, they're up in price at $1 for 2, they are pretty difficult to find at suppliers at those prices for some reason.  I now have a ton of CR2032 batteries, because each one has a new battery.

I use the flickering LEDs as well- no issue there. Looking for the smoke...

I use a fan driven smoke unit for smoke as a rule.

The smoke will catch the light like crazy too. Together it should be spectacular.

i agree with you, i have tried different ways to mount the flickering led's and found the best way for me is to simply drill a hole in the layout platform,  sand it some and line it aluminum   hole about 3/4" works for me, and then put the led's down in the hole and put some firewood, sticks and twigs and some cellophane  paper orange looks best and turn the critter on,  now if i add a whisp of smoke coming up the effect should be good

I have just used one of the flickering leds and it does look good, when you add the smoke it should be so cool, my question is this, what power supply do you need for the fan driven smoke unit ?

For a standard Lionel one with a 27 ohm element, 12V gives you a good amount of smoke.  Since they have a fan supply, you don't need anything else.  If you're using another smoke unit, you have to tailor the power supply to the specific unit you have.

"tailor the power supply"

takes a simple potentiometer wired in to adj voltage,  (you are adding or removing resistance to change the voltage)

That's a big NO on the pot!  You'd have to spend way more money on the size pot you need to adjust smoke unit power than just using a small power supply.

On a locomotive upgrade I just did, I added a regulator to the smoke unit, it allowed adjustable smoke volume from a trickle to engine on fire smoke.  The regulator was one I got off eBay for around a dollar, I added a 30 cent full wave bridge and run it from track power.

In addition, if you use an MTH smoke unit, you need a separate DC supply for the fan as it's going to need different voltage than the heater.

okay,  probably should have clarified that more.  i got stuff still from WWII and before and it is all still available to me.  even got a wwii bc610 radio that takes a truck to haul it

i have stuff that most people dont,  many many many boxes of electronic junk after fifty years in communications industry.  i was more thinking of what i could do here with the junkbox, must have up to fifty different power supplies,  all kinds of potentiometers available (more than i care to count up in attic)

If you want dial in adjustability using a small pot on an adjustable regulator circuit would be another small sized alternative.

See my previous post.