I’ve been thinking about putting a smoke unit in my BLI Class A steamer and would like to know how many here have units in some of their engines?
JaRRell
After all the work I went through painting the ceiling and the wall behind the workbench white I would never consider smoke. But that might just be me. If not for the grandkids I would never consider sound. Life is loud enough.
Smoke is like water… it doesn’t “scale down” very well. It hard to get either one to
look real in a small HO world. Good luck, Dave
Unless you like the idea of cleaning an oily film off of your track every day, not to mention scenery and everything else in the room, skip the smoke.
No HO scale smoke unit looks realistic enough to be worth the hassle of installing it.
Yep, I smoke, pipe and cigaretts. Oh!! Not my locos. Reasons: too much oil residue on locos and track. Smoke not realistic. In order for smoke unit to work half way and produce any amount of smoke, voltage to unit has to be quite high, hence running speed of way to fast. Smoke units do nothing but cook oil to the point it gives off oily vapors and they settle on everything. Plus if you run your loco without oil in the unit it will burn out befor long as there would be no oil to keep that filiment cool. Ken
Hmmmm… maybe this ain’t such a good idea after all…[sigh]
JaRRell
All of my O gauge engines have smoke units, and I wouldn’t buy one without it. The more, the better. Two of my diesels have smoke units as well. Just don’t think of lighting any tobacco-related products in my train room.
I can’t handle the smell the smoke makes, its that oily smell just hangs in the air.
Besides the smell and the oily residue, smoke from an HO scale steam locomotive is wispy and toy-looking. Actually, it looks like someone stuck a lit cigarette down the stack. Two things that don’t scale down well, at least in the smaller scales–real water and real smoke.
Tom
I’ve used smoke units in large scales, they just don’t seem worth the hassle to me - locos and everything else get covered in oily gunge, and they only run for about 5mins between refills. After some testing (and finding this out) I gave up - my locos now run smoke-free!
Jarrell, I have followed a few threads dealing with this subject. The long and the short of it is that it is not a good idea…in the long run. Initially, you might like the effect, but the novelty will diminish and you will have to deal with the inevitable “guck”…everywhere.
It works well for the larger scales, but it detracts from our scale so much that people will never quite ‘buy’ what they are seeing.
I advocate passing up on this idea.
I don’t think you could get an HO loco to do this:
[:D] Dave
Now…what if Lenz was to come out with DCC smoke & steam" unit? Hmm. Why, you could achieve the realism of the steam era and fill your whole train room with water vapor and smoke in a matter of just a few mintues. And, if you lived in FL, you could fill the reservoir of your G-scale 2-8-8-2 tender with the mosquito-bombing chemical and insecticide (using it as a verb here) your whole neighborhood in no time flat.
Gotta be a market somewhere…
Tom
Hmmmm…[thinking]. We DO have a mosquito problem… and I DO have some steam
locos…[:D] Dave
You will never see a smoke unit in ANY of my steam locos, it looks terrible, smells terrible and makes my model look like some Toy Train-MTH-wannabe. If someone makes an effective, clean and non-smelling smoke unit for HO I’ll be the first one to install it. But until then, my steamers are running a clean stack.
I like smoke! I also like the smell! ( But I like the smell of burning nitro and castor oil too! ) It’s just another aspect of the hobby!
I have a few smoke equipped locos that smoke pretty good on my DCC layout. They don’t do too bad on the DC power either.
That being said, I would not equip my more expensive locos with smoke. And it’s not because of the smell, mess or not to scale smoke output. I have notieced a couple of the smokestacks on my smoke equiped locos melting! I’d hate to have the stack on my $500 2-8-8-2 with sound melt down on me! [:0]
Rotor