I last made some smoke for armoured engagements back in 1974, and I have carried the mound of luridly coloured cotton wool around with me for the last 35 years. Finally even I ahd to admit it was too tatty to resemble anything other than extremely ragged cotton wool. At the same time a question was raised on the Blitzkrieg Commander site about where to get reasonably priced coloured smoke to mark KO'd AFVs because the writer didn't want to make their own. I didn't remember it being that difficult but I was young and foolish then - how hard could it be?

The raw material - plain (white for some reason) hamster bedding.

sloshed(technical term with dilute red acrylic)                                      ............ and (although it doesnt show much) yellow

Sprayed with a bit of black                                                                      ...and grey

As torn off and applied to a couple of poor old T-62

Just to give it some scale -                                                                       the intial piece by the 6mm tanks - this was a test piece only.

I made some 'ordinary' smoke for artillery rather than burning velicles while I was spraying the red/yellow hamster bed with grey...

and black.                                                                                               A belated protective smoke deployment.

grey                                                                                                              black.

It took me two days - but only because I started at about 2300hrs and had to let the red/yellow dry. Spraying took about ...a minute. If my two year old hadn't been 'helping' it would have been 20 seconds.