RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Coming from the garden railway hobby, all my steam locos HAVE to smoke - cos they are steam locos right ?

Having acquired, ahem, a few tanks, it is also essential that all my tanks have exhaust plume, to my mind, if its going to look ad sound authentic. exhaust plume is essential ne 'est pas ??

In the garden railway world, a basic smoke unit at 24 volts (Full DCC track power) costs between £20 - 24.00, and a pulsed unit from Massoth costs around £80.00 ! so its re-assuring that you can get a decent tank smoke module for around £10.00

I intend to get an upgrade board with sound for one of my pride of various Tigers and am looking forward to the smoke unit plume increasing with higher revs of the Maybach engine.

TARR smoker and Mega Steam and they smoke fantastic!

To really get the smoke to snyc perfectly with the sounds of the engine..acoustic smoker is the way to go. Small secondary speaker
mounted to TARR. The build by Normand is in the smoker section. My only alteration was to add the speaker/cup to top on TARR I
and have a separate volume control for the acoustic and main speaker.

I will have a look in the smoker section.

Do I take it that most tankers don't tend to have smoke units fitted ?
Why not ?

I have smoke, I think it's cool but that's just me, I'm like a big kid. Some of these guys take their R/C tanks VERY VERY seriously and they tend to not run smoke possibly cause they also battle them.

Surely smoke adds realism ?

I think it does but it also draws current, adds a bit of weight and is another item to potentially break. I know prior to units like the TARR
some people just were sick of smoke units not working consistently.

Heng Long used to offer the choice of smoke and sound or not but now there is no longer the choice,
The early smokers were dreadful in terms of reliability, quite often they would fail after 30 minutes, It did not help that there were no instructions in how to get the best from them,
I was not alone in removing the smoker from every Tank I bought simply to save the frustration of the things,
Then I bought an "IBU 2" and at the same time on the recommendation of this Forum a "TARR Smoker", Both by the way from Ian at http://www.rctankelectronics.com
I have bought more since, WHY? Because they work !! And they keep on working using "Mega-Steam" from " www.petersspares.com ", it comes with a choice of smells in a plastic bottle with an eye dropper so just half the eye dropper will fill the "Tarr Smoker" there are a choice of TARR Smokers and if you go to the RC Tank Electronics site and click on the smoker section you will see which one is best for you..
Shaun.

Smokers are kinda cool. If they work. Outside I never use them anyways, because the smoke gets dispersed far too quickly to be seen. (In the Netherlands it's almost always windy)

Indoors they can add some authenticity, I guess. To me they are cool, but also a bit of a useless gizmo that gobbles power.

I mostly take them out, because the space saved can often be used to fit a compact, powerfull speaker, so motor sound comes from the "right" spot. Sound is more important to me than smoke.

Tbh, really thick diesel smoke is impossible to make anyhoo, afaik, and most sub-24v smokers are rather anemic, or use fog fluid, which makes the smoke a bit like a waterfall, flowing down. Looks worse to me than leaving the smoker out alltogether.

But, that's just a personal preference. Kids usually love it though, when a model makes a lot of noise, ànd smokes to boot.

Great points! Though using an acoustic smoker and the TARR I (and being able to adjust the voltage on the resistor and the sound output
on the small acoustic speaker) you can really get as much or little smoke as you want in my view. Also it syncs with engine sounds from thumping at idle to plumes at higher revs etc. I though agree..for me too.. sound is primary but I have managed to get an enclosed FRS 8 and small acoustic smoker going in almost all my tanks so far.