I bought one of these with the explicit purpose to resell it. I knew it was not new and may have needed some work to properly sell. And in attempting to fix it, I realized just what a terrible design this is.
I've also had one in my personal collection for about a year, but never even opened the box. I took it out today to compare it against the one I was going to repair.
First, it actually was working. But the smoke is so anemic, no one would fault you for calling it broken.
In opening up the Caboose, there is a plastic resivoir with a 17ohm resistor and the smallest, thinnest piece of batting that you've ever seen that is supposed to be draped around the heating element.
I thought simple fix, just improve the amount and a quality of the batting material and adjust the resistor to make sure it is in proper contact.
However, I soon found out that these things are very temperamental in that they need to "breathe" quite a bit. If you have the batting too tight against it, or wrapping it around, it will not produce much smoke.
Now if you position the batting material just right, you can get this to smoke profusely. The problem is, as soon as you close the resivoir back up, the smoke just doesn't rise out. You're lucky if you even get it to the top of the stack. I know it's smoking inside because as soon as you open it back up, all of the smoke pours out. Keep on mind nothing is obstructing the chimney. All of the batting is on the bottom.
I thought maybe it just wasn't building enough pressure, so I disconnected it from the board that was taking the track power down to 4.5 volts and powered it with 14 volts. Doing this only made the smoke pour out of two tiny side holes which I am guessing are meant for airflow. I could tell it was also cooking the batting material inside and probably would have melted the plastic housing if I let it go long enough. At no point could I ever get smoke to rise out of the chimney in about 3 hours of tinkering.
So I took one of them and installed a tiny seuthe unit. I was surprised how well this one worked... Much better that what I presume is a much larger unit in my Blue Comet. You can see a video linked below.
For the other unit, does anyone have any ideas for getting this to perform respectively without adding the seuthe unit? It's already an expensive item so I'd rather not add parts to it is I don't have to.
Below are some pictures they try and give an idea of what I have described above.
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I've also had one in my personal collection for about a year, but never even opened the box. I took it out today to compare it against the one I was going to repair.
First, it actually was working. But the smoke is so anemic, no one would fault you for calling it broken.
In opening up the Caboose, there is a plastic resivoir with a 17ohm resistor and the smallest, thinnest piece of batting that you've ever seen that is supposed to be draped around the heating element.
I thought simple fix, just improve the amount and a quality of the batting material and adjust the resistor to make sure it is in proper contact.
However, I soon found out that these things are very temperamental in that they need to "breathe" quite a bit. If you have the batting too tight against it, or wrapping it around, it will not produce much smoke.
Now if you position the batting material just right, you can get this to smoke profusely. The problem is, as soon as you close the resivoir back up, the smoke just doesn't rise out. You're lucky if you even get it to the top of the stack. I know it's smoking inside because as soon as you open it back up, all of the smoke pours out. Keep on mind nothing is obstructing the chimney. All of the batting is on the bottom.
I thought maybe it just wasn't building enough pressure, so I disconnected it from the board that was taking the track power down to 4.5 volts and powered it with 14 volts. Doing this only made the smoke pour out of two tiny side holes which I am guessing are meant for airflow. I could tell it was also cooking the batting material inside and probably would have melted the plastic housing if I let it go long enough. At no point could I ever get smoke to rise out of the chimney in about 3 hours of tinkering.
So I took one of them and installed a tiny seuthe unit. I was surprised how well this one worked... Much better that what I presume is a much larger unit in my Blue Comet. You can see a video linked below.
For the other unit, does anyone have any ideas for getting this to perform respectively without adding the seuthe unit? It's already an expensive item so I'd rather not add parts to it is I don't have to.
Below are some pictures they try and give an idea of what I have described above.
