Steam from a scaled-down locomotive....

[Ike]

On a safety note I would try and keep the hottest part of the unit at below 300 Celsius, as you start to get hotter you risk breaking down the various glycols found in fog fluid and can end up with Formaldehyde amongst other equally unpleasant things. In traditional smoke machines with heater blocks you can normally get good results by keeping the outside of the block (but inside the insulation) at about 200 Celsius.

[Ekij]

The loco is about a foot long by about eight inches high

If a loco that small produces enough smoke to be seen beyond the first row it's going to look silly.

[cedd]

Think these may be exactly what you're after;

 

http://www.smokemachines.net/buy-car-smoke...ty-system.shtml

 

http://www.smokemachines.net/buy-le-maitre...ist-turbo.shtml

 

The first is designed for in-car security use (12v), the second plugs into the mains to heat up, then can be removed.

 

 

C

[Jivemaster]

Both bigger that the prac! But take note that the 12v one draws 25 amps thats a lot to get from a small battery.

[GridGirl]

The problem has been solved! It turns out our local hire company owns an Antari D-5000 mini-fogger which runs off batteries and has about a 3-second warm up time - and it's small enough to go in the loco :) I've done a fair amount of work for the company over the years but somehow never knew they had the fogger, hence the original question! The smoke coming out of the 2-metre long Dreadnought battleship has also been solved with a cheap (and small, lightweight!) disco fogger, an 800w inverter (also from our friendly local hire company!) and a deep-cycle rechargeable battery.

[Jivemaster]

Just a caution with disco foggers. They have a heat cool cycle - while they are heating they will not make fog! could be a minute or two of heating every fiveish minutes. Better foggers have better control and will always fog on cue.

[aidso]

Ok don’t know if this is possible. You said no wires. We had to do something a while ago. We used a caption K fog machine and a piece of clear rubber hose used for the garden. We were lucky that the hose slipped over the nozzle of the machine and we pumped the smoke about 10m around the back of the stage and out a car exhaust. The tubing is only about 6-7mm and is clear.

[GridGirl]

We took the heating cycle of the disco fogger into account and figured that we'd probably get away with it by filling the chamber the machine sits in with smoke while we could, and then given that the funnels the smoke exits through are small, the heating cycle would have finished by the time we needed to fill up the chamber again. The smoke doesn't have to appear on cue - it's more of an effect to create believability - so it wasn't going to be an issue. As it turns out, the scene has been re-written - the joys of adapting a script as you go along! - and we now have time to get the mini-fogger (which is not an Antari, it's a Kupo, for anyone who cares!) out of the train and into the Dreadnought.

[dbuckley]

Whilst groping for the Kupo fogmate D5000, I found Look Solutions who do a brace of battery powered foggers, including a really, really, really ickle specimen:

 

http://www.looksolutions.com/images/produkte/TF-okPhs.gif

 

How sweet is that!

[timtheenchanteruk]

Maplin used to do a aerosol can of smoke, I have also seen similar used to test smoke detectors, in the right place with a remote trigger??

[GridGirl]

Whilst groping for the Kupo fogmate D5000, I found Look Solutions who do a brace of battery powered foggers, including a really, really, really ickle specimen:

 

I really, really, really wanted one of those but unfortunately no hire company in NZ has one, so we would have had to buy one; there doesn't appear to be a Look Solutions dealer in NZ, and the Aussie outfit who deal in them wouldn't answer their phone; we could have brought one in from Britain but 500 pounds plus about another 100 pounds in freight to get it here on time would have used up all the tech budget in one fell swoop, so the lighting designer would not have been pleased with me! The Kupo Fogmate, while not as cool or cute, is doing the job nicely, and has cost us NZD$150 to hire for five weeks!!!