Im kinda new to electric flight so forgive me if this seems a dumb question. I bought a great planes park flyer kit and also bought the great planes c-35 speed control, 400 size motor, 400 gear box and a 11.1 1250 mah LiPo battery. Anyway when i charged my battery last night and got my motor all connections made i thought i would see if everthing worked. When i put some power to the moter i noticed some smoke coming from out of the inside of the brand new speed control. It wasnt hot to the touch or anything but was a noticable amount of smoke. Everything works fine but surely thats not normal. I checked all my connections to make sure i had the + and - on the motor and speed control right and it was ok. It seems to do it worse when im barely giving the motor some throttle. Any advise would be appreciated. This is my first electric setup.

Get a wattmeter (or borrow one), and see how much current your drawing. You have to have an appropriate prop size/pitch and gearbox ratio to be sure you're not drawing too much current. Make sure the motor/gearbox spins freely and is not binding too.

You're correct, a smoking esc is not normal.
Are your components compatible, brushed motor and esc. or brushless? Brushed and brushless are not compatible in any combination.
If the esc and motor are compatible, does the esc have a li-po setting for the number of cells? 11.1 v. is 3-cells; some esc's must be programmed for that.

Some components are faulty out of the box, so this is a possibility also.

Yeah im using a brushed ESC and a brushed motor. The ESC does have a setting for the 3 cell LiPo. The only thing i can possibly think of it wasnt exactly sure what type of solder i used to solder all my connection since the label was worn off. Im not sure if there could be that much resistance in a connection or not though. Could be a bad motor pulling a ton of amps. Thanks for the replys and feel free to post any more thoughts.