My smoke upgrade

Nice and simple mod that makes a heckuva difference.  

-Pete

Joe,

Very nicely done!!!!

Alex

Was the new resistor wire wound or solid?

Looks great, glad that worked out for you.  Are you sure that's not an MTH smoke unit?  

Call the EPA, we have a polluter in our midst!  

Wirewound, I get them from Digikey.  I buy This Resistor and use a Dremel wire wheel to knock off the powdered ceramic coating.

Glad I bought a few extras.  First one I ruined cleaning off the ceramic coating. The second one, I didn't worry about getting all the coating off, just got a good amount off.

Once you get the "touch" down, you can do them pretty easily.  I just got ten more the other day and cleaned them off.  I measured them before and after to make sure they didn't change significantly in value. 

I hold the resistor by the lead right at the resistor and lightly run the wire wheel over it at a fairly good speed.  The technique is to simply "brush" it with the tips of the bristles, the ceramic comes off pretty easily.  I don't get every "smidge" off, just most of it.

What an improvement.

Looks much better now.....no Super Chuffer board???? Great candidate for it

That's the next upgrade on my list.   After that, I just need 4 chuffs per rev.

When I get some time, I'm going to see if I can enhance the Super-Chuffer to generate a "phantom" chuff between real ones so that you can synthesize 4-chuffs from 2-chuffs.  It may be tricky, but it would be a cool feature.  It would have to measure the intervals of the on/off of the chuff switch and then dynamically time when to insert the extra chuff.  I don't know if I can get it to work well enough to actually use it, but it's worth a shot...

This would be AWESOME!!!!!!!!

Thanks,

- Mario

It will be difficult reading the color code on those!

BBROYGBVGW GSN

That's what ohmmeters are for.

I also put them in a little bag labeled with the value.

Gunrunner,

Any way to upgrade the smoke unit for Chessie T-1 from 1991?

Joe

Nice work!!

There's always a way, what's the specific model number?

Really sweet upgrade thanks to John's recommendation. Simple solution.

As  gunrunner has told me, there may be more involved than just changing the resistor to a 20 ohm.

18011

That locomotive has a mechanical smoke unit, and it's the sealed plastic one.  You'd have to really change the smoke unit to do anything to that one.

I added the diagrams for the 18011 to this post.

You can change the resistor in your 18011 for better smoke. Also block the ports for the steam chest. You definitly want to change the batting if your not going to install a fan driven unit.

Bill

Bill, I thought that was a sealed smoke unit, obviously I'm mistaken.   I didn't realize you could get into that one.

 You can replace the resistor and batting, but it is a pita.

Bill

I'll take your word for it.

I have batting. Would I use a 20 ohm resister? Are they available at York? Don't want to try to buy one resister from Digi-Key.

John 

I suspect someone at York should have them, but I don't know for sure.