@Alabama Joe posted:My Whistle Smoke is weak also. I tried a Challenger fix, by raising the front of the engine thinking some fluid might migrate to the Whistle. However, no change.
Reminder it has a 2 in 1 smoke unit at the front of the engine under the stack. So far it seems Lionel's method of just putting smoke in the stack to replenish both units works well enough. I did find on mine that the exit hole for the whistle steam was partically blocked by some black foam, but it still worked pretty good overall.
I was able to clear the partical blockage by carefully putting a thin tipped soldering iron in the hole, being careful not to go too deep and not to burn the paint around the hole, burning away some of that foam. However, I would recommend sending it back to lionel to have them fix that if yours has the exit hole partcially blocked.
I have indeed noticed the whistle steam smoke unit does take a while to warm up fully and needs to be operated multiple times to get stong output. Although my home layout uses a Z-750 and I remember hearing sine wave transformers will make the smoke units have less smoke output compared to chopped sine wave transformers (like Lionel's). I will report back on the weekend if the whistle steam smoke unit puts out more output on the Lionel transformers at my club.
