MTH smoke unit in an Aristo-Craft C-16

Garden Railroading
1

Hello Friends,

My father absolutely fell in love with the “puffing” feature of the MTH smoke units and must have it for his loco. First off, it seems difficult to find these units for sale by themselves. If anyone knows where to go to find them, I would be grateful. Also how exactly do I go about installing this unit. They seem quite large. If there is anyone who has already done this, I would appreciate pictures and tips.

Thank you for your time

Alex

2

Massoth also has one like that, but I don’t know what type of control system you are using.

3

MTH “pulses on and off” the fan in their fan driven smoke units in step with the driver rotation.

The new C-16 from Aristo-Craft also uses a fan driven smoke unit. It should not be a big problem to switch it on/off with a contact on the drivers or side rods.

The older C-16 ???

4

MTH smoke units have no “brains” in them… they have a 4 wire interface, 2 for the fan, and 2 for the heater element.

All the puffing, etc, is handled by their MTH DCS decoder.

There are DCC decoders that will the same kind of control, like Zimo decoders.

In another category, are smoke units that have an input to control the fan and/or heater.

TAS used to make them, they got bought by Lionel, Massoth sells one, it has an input that you pulse to make it “puff”…

Yet another category are units with electronics that keep them from burning out, but just basically have a constant smoke output, normally somewhat more at higher voltages, like the Aristo unit.

Finally, there are the really dumb smoke units, that are just a heater that will burn out if you run it dry, like the stock LGB units, and the old Aristo units.

You want to so some more reading on these, it’s easy to get confused, especially since some are advertised in a somewhat misleading way.

You can read up a bit on my site:

http://www.elmassian.com/trains/dcc-battery-rc-electronics/smoke-units

Regards, Greg

5

greg’s website

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6

Yep, had a major revision to my site, and some of the links have changed.

Go to the home page, and navigate to the section on smoke units.

it’s under:

Large Scale Trains

Power/Electronics/Remote Control…

Smoke Units

(hopefully I have controlled the problem where links can change.)

Greg…

p.s. By exploring, you might find a few other things of interest, there are nearly 400 web pages on my site.