[sanddrag]

I need to somehow make a small smoke machine give a powerful blast of smoke rather than the mediocre flow it has coming right out of it.

I thought I had the perfect system designed. You have your smoke machine. Right after it you have a sprinkler valve we'll call valve A. Then you have a little bit of line (hose/pipe) and then a T with a compressed air line coming into it. On the compressed air line you have a sprinkler valve B. Then coming out of the other inline part of the T you have a long length of line and then at the very end, a final sprinkler valve C. To emphasize, the compressed air and valve B are in between valve A and C.

To "fire" it, you would first keep valves C and B closed and valve A open. You would then produce smoke from the smoke machine and fill the line. When the line is filled with smoke, you would close valve A and open valve B to let in compressed air. You would wait about half a second for some pressure to build, and then open valve C to release a "blast" of smoke.

Well, I tried it and all I was able to do was make a pretty effective fog horn. The problem is this: the sprinkler valves take a miniumum of 10 or 15 psi to operate which the smoke sure as heck isn't going to be able to produce on its own. So, the smoke was never getting past valve A whether the valve was open or not.

What I'm trying to avoid is putting back pressure on the nozzle of the smoke machine. But any one way valve I believe is going to have a minimum operating pressure. Is there any sort of commonly available solenoid valve that is free flowing straight through and requires no minimum pressure?

If any of you have any ideas, please post them before 9AM Pacific time tomorrow. I need to build this thing tomorrow. I am open to other ideas, but I'm not going to hunt down anything that's not commonly available at a hardware store and I'm looking at a budget of maybe $100 max when it is done (including valves excluding a compressor).

Thanks so much.