Yes, my big Sukhois have been smoking up the sky around Ottawa/Canada for 4 seasons now with very few problems and ridiculous amounts of smoke. I'm almost afraid to do tail slides since I can't see the plane ;)

   I use a B&B smoke pump vacuum driven from a Brison Sachs 4.2. It has a B&B on/off valve which is attached to the throttle for low throttle cutoff and mixed with a knob on my TX to give me a bit of volume control. I use low volume for practice, low throttle or perfect blue sky days and high volume when I have an appreciative audience (especially kids ;).

   I use a Slimline muffler but not the smoker version. I inject into the exhaust port right above the exhaust port on the cylinder. A piece of 1/8" copper tube is J&B welded into the port and flattened slightly to make the liquid spray a bit of a fan pattern when it hits the exhaust. The copper tube is more than an inch long so that the Tygon line that carries the liquid from the valve does not have to be too close to the muffler and will hence not melt.

   The real secret of my success is the liquid. Basically you have to use a mineral oil based smoke fluid. B&B and MDW SuperDri both make fluids, both are ridiculously overpriced but work magnificently. Start with these mixes and when happy, then start playing with other liquids to reduce the cost. Basically if you cannot get SuperDri to work well you will never have much luck with anything else.

   The current best alternative to SuperDri that I've tried is the same stuff the full sized guys use. Canpos-13 a.k.a Corvus from Texaco. Its a mineral oil used for concrete and rubber form release and can also be used for heat transfer applications and lubrication. The only real problem with Canopus is that it is not quite thin enough and you need large plumbing to make it work well. I've been trying to find a lower viscosity mineral oil but have not had much luck. There is a company called Penrico (sp?) which makes mineral oils in the appropriate viscosities but I've not tried to buy any. Food grade mineral oils (a.k.a. baby oil) should work very well but are obviously too expensive to use unless purchased in bulk.

   A 4.2 will burn between 8 and 10oz of fluid a minute for good smoke. I use a 24oz tank for an 8 minute flight with careful control of when it is on and off.

   Check out www.ibiska.com/~orcc then go to the photos section and you will see my Sukhoi in a vertical snap with the smoke on. Could be www.ibiska.com/orcc (without the tilde... can't remember).

   Cheers,

   Peter
 
 

The mix in question was 3/4 Canopus and 1/4 Kerosene. I forgot who suggested Kerosene to thin the Canopus a bit but thanks.

No smell, no mess, same puffy white smoke as SuperDri and total cost is about 1/4 to 1/3rd that of SuperDri.

I don't know how well this will work with a glow engine, probably as well as SuperDri.
B.T.W. managed to get an awesome Lumchevack off the top of a loop with the smoke on. WOW, end over end in a huge cloud of smoke.  Actually the smoke is almost too much, certainly for hovering since I can't see the plane after a second... which gives me a good excuse for mucking up the hovers!

 Happy (cheaper) smoking.

    Cheers,

    Peter

Couple of interesting developments in my quest for the perfect cheap smoke fuild. Obviously as I have posted here before Canopus-13 by Texaco works great when cut slightly to reduce the viscosity. Also I just noticed that TME now sells Canopus directly from Texaco in a 5 gallon pail at exactly the price Texaco charges for the pail.

  Good for you TME!! At least now more folks will get better smoke instead of fiddling with Diesel etc. mixes. I had a few friends  that gave up on smoke after buying a TME and then dicking with the different mixes. Most refuse to spend what MDW wants for SuperDri which is a pity because only a mineral oil will work well.

  Now, in my quest not to have to add anything to the Canopus-13 to get the right viscosity I did a little search for other paraffinic mineral oils (white mineral oils). I found two others , both of which are 1/2 or less the viscosity and one of which has A FLASH POINT 100 F lower than Canopus-13!!!!!

 Here is my top 3 list so far:

MFGR    PRODUCT        Viscosity          Flash point
======================================================
Texaco  Canopus-13     12.1    cSt@40C    355 F
Penreco Peneteck       3.4-4.7 cSt@40C    265 F
Penreco Draketex 50    6.5-7.8 cSt@40C    305 F

    Note that I have not tried either of the Penreco products but I suspect that phoning anybody that sells mineral oils and asking
for a viscosity of 4-5 cSt@40C and a Flash point under 300F is going to work very very well.

    I have no idea how much these Penreco products cost but I'm sure somewhere there is a source of a mineral oil with these
properties that is not too expensive.

    One other alternative with the Canopus-13 is to keep all the plumbing extra large and/or heat the liquid slightly. Leaving
the jug out in the sun on a good hot summers day is bound to help. (I.e. to lower its viscosity, not to help get to the flash
point).

    Happy (inexpensive) smoking ...

    Peter

Neither of them Canopus and Superdry are obtainable in The Netherlands!?
Now I am getting from a friend smoke liquid wat is used from firemen!
They use it for smoke-curtains and will smoke at 200 degrees....so it could work.

With kind regards,
 Met vriendelijke groet,

Peter wrote:

    When I tried Diesel and various ratios of Auto Transmission fluid in my Sachs 4.2, I got a) smelly smoke and plane and b) the smoke was a kind of light grey instead of puffy white. Have you ever compared this to SuperDri or Corvus? The test flights I've done (back to back) show the SuperDri to be twice as good as any Diesel/oil mix and a pure white non smelly color compared to a light grey, smelly. Admitedly on a clear blue day with no wind 100% Diesel or various Diesel/oil mixes look
not too bad.

    I'm about to experiment with Corvus (Canopus) and Kerosene mixed 4:1. I know the corvus will work exceptionally well as that's what all the full scale aircraft use but it needs to be thinned just a tad for use in R/C applications. Kerosene seems to mix with it quite well so we'll see how it goes this weekend.

    Cheers,

    Peter

First you must perfect a really good smoke system for the model, because the dye efectifley diluted the flow. 2.1

Corvus oil, Concreat form release oil. workes well becaus it has a lot of wax in it.

As the next post says Kerosean=paraffin! But paraffin wax brings up a interesting point. It is the wax that makes
the white smoke.

The heat vaporises the  fluid, the wax coats the molecules, so appearing white.    A dye is used to colour the Wax.
I must be petroleum compatible dye as used to colour Kerosean pink or blue.

In the States such a dye is made by Morton Thikol Chemical division 2 North Riverside Place Chicago We know what thay make dont we! My info on the address may be out of date.

The worlds jet acrobatic teams use Thair products.  Mix it 2-1 or even 1-1 Thair is a good reason why only Jet aircraft make coulerd smoke.   It messy! the strong dye gets everywhere. It will cover the bottom of the aircraft. your hands, your box. your shoes. You can clean up with gasoline but that could be dangerous. You need to develop a handling system and wear disposable gloves.Its not dangerous , just messy. Also it is expensive , and you need a lot. A full Red Arrows routine uses 8 gallons of etch colour pr. aircraft pr. display.

With jets it is pumped with simple pressure into the edge of the jet efflux. the injection point is chosen with care as to hot can burn the dye and  then you just get brown.

Having said all that It IS worth it for that special display. Red is especialy good.

Richard Crapp

Gwinkler wrote:
Try using a mixture of glycerin (glycerol) and water.  This is the substance used by many DJ's for fog effects at dances.  I've tried it, and it really puts out the smoke.  Non-toxic too.

Heres what you need for a smoke setup.

1.)  A pump for oil delivery.   TME makes one that plugs right into your Rx on a spare channel for about 60 bucks.
2.)   An extra fuel tank for the smoke oil.    Use one as big as you can fit into your fuselage as it goes quick quick.   NOTE: if your gonna use desiel or kerosene you will have use a stopper on the fuel tank that is compatable.....along with fuel lines in the plane. The normal fuel lines will rott with this stuff.......also make previsions for the  fueling tank and a means to fuel or pump the stuff in.
3.)    A smoke muffler.     You can either buy one or make your own.    However the key here is HEAT HEAT HEAT and more HEAT!

Im not sure if the engine you spoke of is Gas or not,  but I have been told time and again that without a Gas engine you will never get enough heat to make worth while smoke.  This is TRUE in the highest.

I have the above setup on my Saito 1.20 and its worthless.    Even made a pre-heater out of soft copper tubeing wraped around the exhaust for the oil to go through before it got to the exhaust......still never looked much better than a typical exhaust trail.   On the ground it looks great...but in the air, as I said just like an exhaust trail.    For me it wasnt worth the extra weight
in the plane so Im takeing it all out.

Hopefully your success will be better than mine.   Im saving smoke for a Gas powered plane down the road.    Sure do envy those guys right now  :)

Good Luck!

RCritestuf

The key to making smoke is partly pre-heating (I used to think pre-heating was # 1 a while back), and the major concern is how it is injected (where) and in what manner. A large pressure tap does you no good. For a smoke system to work properly,
you have to atomize the fluid as much as possible. In order to do this, you need to have a small, I mean small hole on a pressure tap or a sort of orfis that will spray your fuild into the muffler at the hottest part. Think about it. If you take a spray bottle and shoot a stream on something, how fast does the water evaporate? If you then set it to a finer mist, or spread the water molcules apart into smaller droplets, they will dissipate faster. I've had good luck with pre-heaters in the past, but I found a noticeable difference in the amount of smoke if you flare the end of a copper tube to make a spray (if it's an internal pre-heater) or get a
really small pressure tap.

I just finised a Midwest Super Stinker this year with a Moki 1.8 on it. I used  Bisson's injector nipple which uses this same sort of principle. Granted, there is no pre-heater on this engine and I doubted it would be a very impressive system. Boy, was I shocked.. Check out http://members.tripod.com/~tsunam/stkr1.jpg for a photo of this. The key is atomizing and getting the right amount of fuild injected into a muffler. Too much does no good.

Try thr super dri liquid. As for having a gas engine, my moki proved this wrong :)

Michael Luvara

I had the TME pump, a 10oz smoke tank, 500mah battery all tucked into the empty space under the fuel tank on a Sig Astro Hog Bipe. It hardly noticed the extra weight, and it looked great doing snaps or tail slides with the smoke on.

All in all, it provided good smoke. Nothing like a G62 blowing full smoke, but a nice pleasing effect overall.

Stephen

Peter Ashwood-Smith wrote:
The secret to good smoke is a) heat and b) the proper fluid. The answer to the proper fluid is SuperDri by MDW. This stuff is twice as good as any other combination you can mix yourself and makes no smell and very little mess.

Ok, that aside the next problem is heat. A big engine like the 1.8 should be not bad. I'd suggest simply running some kind of copper piping around the head of the motor before injecting it directly into the muffler just slightly aft of the engine's exhaust port. There are other options like coils that are snaked up inside the muffler but I don't think that's such a good idea, mine just broke on both my smoker mufflers but my application has more vibration than yours. The larger the volume of your muffler the better the smoke because it has longer to smoulder in the muffler before hitting the cold outside air.

Slimline style pitts smoker mufflers work really well but don't go out and buy one if you already have a smiline non smoker muffler. Instead, run copper tubes from one end of the muffler to the other and connect them with external pieces of neopreme in a U. Make sure you give yourself a good inch of copper sticking out of the canister so that the neopreme is not too close to the muffler. You can stick the copper tubes with JB weld which will hold up well to the heat. You probably only need one or two runs back and forth through the canister before the final injection but you can experiment with more runs if the results are not good.

    The cost? Well by far the most expensive thing is the smoke liquid. Its about $10 a gallon up here in Canada and I go through 20oz in 3 minutes. You could probably get 5 minutes on 15 oz but you're still gonna spend some money. Certainly more than the cost of your glow fuel.

    As far as pumps are concerned I have no experience with small glow engine based systems but many folks like the TME electric system since it requires no fancy mods or plumbing. I use a Bennet system on a big Brison Sachs 4.2 which works flawlessly.