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Thanks, that should hold me for a while. chuckm, I followed your links, and found a product at Granger (90 second chemical smoke generator, 600 cubic feet, no harmful residue etc blah blah) that seems worth the risk for an experiment. At nearly 7 cf per second, it should be visible to 60 mph as a discrete line of smoke. I'll get a box of 10, fabricate some sort of chamber/wand for it and report back.
Re the legality, well...I don't plan to do it in town, I'll carry a copy of Mother Earth News with me so I can show it's for a good cause, I'll practice my innocent smile ("But officer, smoke generators weren't mentioned in the driver's handbook and it wasn't on the test!") and once it hits my wake I believe it will be diluted about 80 to 1 by the surrounding air and not too noticeable. I think I can be discreet--we have a lot of low occupancy roads in rural Southern Oregon--and surely I can talk my way out of getting my car impounded if I proooomise I'll nevernever do it again.
As for oil-in-the-exhaust generators--I've used corvus oil in my air show performances (yet another aspect of my misspent youth--if I ever write an action-adventure novel I have the "about the author" credits in the bag) but the high cfm is going to put the car in a cloud, not produce a discrete stream of smoke. Ditto re skydivers' smoke generators, they too make a huge amount of smoke. Ditto re following a smoke generating car--its wake is going to scramble the smoke into a cloud. Y'all may already know that stuff; sometimes it's hard to tell when somebody is kidding on the Internet.
I think smoke-on-the-fly might be an interesting alternative to tuft testing and/or oil-and-lampblack testing if it can be done cheaply (and discreetly) enough--and a $20 box of chemical smoke generators is less threatening to the wallet than a $1000 oil vaporizer. So give me a couple weeks and I'll tell you how it worked.
PS--Frank Lee, you may be right, it might be better to make the wand moveable rather than reposition it every trip. Maybe I can make something passenger-actuated.
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