Hello all,
I got a Williams Berkshire about a year ago. When I got it it smoked nicely, for about 1/2 hour. Slowly lessend till it totaly stopped. After deciding what to do I sent it back to Williams. Got it back in a week and a half. But it doesn’t smoke like it did when it was new. I figure why send it back again. I would consider putting in another smoke unit, but don’t know what to put in. It would be nice to be able to put in a MTH unit since they sloke like crazy. Could this be done. What do you recommend?
Bill, I have the same problem with my Williams 671. There was a thread on another forum indicating the problem is the center tube getting clogged and opening it up with a very fine pin. The author also warned that you don’t want to enlarge the opening though. I plan to try this with a small drill bit. It appears that the smoke fluid crystalizes. I found a small speck on the outside of the tube that looked like epoxy. The center tube seems to be filled with the same material. Maybe it is epoxy but I intend to take a chance and clean it out.
I remember reading somewhere that this is why Williams recommends using only Seuthe smoke fluid, because it’s a thinner viscosity than other brands and won’t cause clogging. That said, I’ve been using other brands of fluid in my Williams turbine without problems so far, but I do have the Seuthe fluid and I probably should start using it.
The only issue that I can think of with replacing the smoke unit with another would be having enough room inside for it. The Seuth units aren’t very large compared to fan-driven units. You probably would have to remove material from inside the boiler casting to make room for a different unit.
TrainAmerica Studios offers a Turbo Smoke unit that reportedly has prolific smoke output and can be used in many retrofits. You might want to investigate whether it will fit your Berk. Here’s the link:
I just had a closer look at the smoke unit on my Williams 671. There appears to be a small hard (metal??) dome inside the small tube in the center. I didn’t drill it out but did take a very sharp point and ran it around the edge of that dome. I can’t tell you I scraped a lot of crud from that space but it now smokes about as well as when it was new.
Same thing happened to my Classic Repro Class J. Happened about a year ago and finally got around to taking it to my local Williams dealer a couple of weeks ago. No word yet.