For you folks that are using the Super-Chuffer, I came up with an installation enhancement. How would you like to have the smoke volume lower when you stop? I got to thinking about this, and thought it would be neat to have great smoke while I was running, but if I stop for a spell with the smoke on, I'd like it to be more "idle smoke", not a huge stream. With that in mind, I set about seeing how I'd accomplish that.
Since the Super-Chuffer already knows when you're stopped, that's when it turns the cab light on, it turns out this is pretty easy. If you just add a 12VDC relay across the cab light with a filter cap to eliminate contact chatter, you have a set of contacts that open and close when you start and stop! Cool beans, so how can you use these? If you run the smoke power through the normally-closed contacts of the relay we just installed, it will turn off the smoke whenever you stop and the cab light comes on. Since we don't actually want to really totally turn it off, I put a few diode pairs across the normally-closed contacts. This allows a reduced voltage to flow to the smoke unit, the exact amount of reduction can be "tuned" by the number of diode pairs you use, each pair drops the voltage about .6 to .7 volts. In the example below, I use a pair of 1.2A bridge rectifiers, each bridge is two diode pairs. This results in a drop of close to 3 volts when I measure it, and the smoke volume falls off very nicely at idle.
I installed this in a test locomotive, and the effect is really cool, well worth the small investment in parts and labor!
Here's a diagram of how I did it.
I've kept the crazy circuitry in the hope that the wicking will last just a little longer if the TAS over heating circuit is working correctly. In theory anyway.
