maillemaker

So I got one of the latest generation Heng Long smokers - the ones with the squirrel cage fan. I really like them - they smoke a lot and they are relatively quiet compared to the old piston jobs.

However, when I try to drive my tank at more than half throttle, the "engine" shuts down.

I'm charging my batteries now to make sure I have full charges but I'm guessing it's pulling too much current? I guess I'll have to pull out the multimeter.

I've got the motor hooked up to the Proportional Smoke plug, and the heater plugged into the Heater plug.

I'm using an IBU2U board.

Any ideas?

borealis

...and if you disconnect the smoker does it work fine?

Tankhobby

I had the same issue when I put a smoker in one of my 1/6 scale tanks. It doesn't use an IBU2U board but the smoker drew too much current from the power supply that was shared with my sound board. So the sound died and the smoker stopped working. It was an easy fix where I swapped out the voltage regulator that they were sharing to a higher current one (originally a 2 amp I changed to a 5 amp). So your issue may be with the battery supplying enough current if it's fully charged when this happens. Measuring the current will tell you. I use a watt meter between my battery and the tank's circuitry to see what the current/power draw is to ensure the battery is sufficient for the tank. They are pretty handy devices, you get voltage, lowest voltage, amp hour peak amp and peak power.

maillemaker

Sorry for the late reply; had a shooting competition last weekend to get ready for.

If I shut down the smoker, tank runs fine.

With the smoker on, tank runs fine at low speed, but shuts down at high speed. When shut down, if I use "engine on" on the controller it fires right up again, until you try to go max speed.

My guess is this new Heng Long smoker pulls more current than the IBU2U can handle. I'll have to go get my multimeter. Not sure what I'll do about that. This thing makes great smoke. Much better than the old piston smokers.

tankme

I can only speculate, but HL has changed the smoker in recent years from the piston based to a motor based one. I don't think the IBU has had any hardware updates since that was done. I'd be curious if it has issues with an older HL smoker?

maillemaker

No, I used to run it with the old HL piston smoker, and I ran it with the TARR smoker, with no problems.

The piston smoker was noisy and didn't smoke very well, and neither did the TARR smoker. These new HL smokers with the squirrel cage fan smoke great. But it looks like the IBU2U can't handle them.

Crius

Hey MM, sorry I can't help with your current problem, but since you're interested in smokers I wanted to show you that there's a lot you can do yourself to get better smoke. I know the piston smokers can be loud but without that piston you don't get the pulsating effect of a real engine. I've tried the TARR and a couple others that just use a fan, but they give a steady stream of smoke that I find to be unrealistic. I'm still working on making the piston smoker a bit more quiet, and I have a few ideas yet to try, so you may have suggestions, but this is the unit I built for my Jagdpanther. I knew a stock smoker of any kind would have a big job with those huge elbow pipes on the JP, so I replaced their heat element with a 10 ohm, 1 watt, wire wound resistor and added a fan to the piston smoker to get more output. Smoke fluid also makes a big difference and I've tried many different kinds, from stock to straight Johnson's baby oil to a custom blend of my own using distilled water and liquid glycerin but so far the best I've found is called "Megasteam". Made for model railroaders, it works great and comes in many different scents. Here's a video of the unit I did for the JP, hopefully it will give you some ideas that maybe we can both use.

maillemaker

I also use the Megasteam stuff. Although I'm using up what came with the Heng Long tanks recently.

My TARR smoker worked OK in my Sherman for a while, but quit. I opened it up and the wick is charred on the resistor.

What should I use to replace the wick?

Crius

You can get Kevlar for that, but I have a boatload of old junk HL smokers so I just take it out of those and re-use it.

maillemaker

Good idea - I will go raid old smokers (hope I didn't throw them out...I think I did)

maillemaker

I appear to have had some success making the smoker work. I went into the .ini file and changed the max and min proportional smoke setting to 10%. Seems to work fine indoors. I'll try it tomorrow in the grass.