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Old 10-01-2008, 09:29 AM
luke strawwalker's Avatar
luke strawwalker luke strawwalker is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tbzep
Don't forget that Damon also bought Centuri, with both companies co-existing until Centuri shut down around 1983. Toward the end, the companies became more and more intertwined with several identical product offerings.



Yes... but it was more of a 'merger' than Centuri 'shutting down'... go to http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/rockets/rockets.html and scroll down and check out the last couple or three Centuri catalogs... You'll find that the last Centuri catalog is produced EXACTLY like the Estes catalog of the time. The layout, symbols, everything except the products (most of them, interestingly enough the Pola-Pulse (Estes) launch controller is an exact duplicate of the Power-Pulse (Centuri) controller). If you read the last three, you'll see that about 1/3 of the Centuri line had been dropped by the time of the last catalog. Now Centuri was before my time, but I've really been enjoying reading all their old catalogs and stuff. Both companies were owned by Damon and Centuri was simply 'absorbed' into Estes and faded away...

Now to the orignal question... when people refer to the "Damon era" they're referring the changes made to the Estes products/company after Damon bought them out, as compared to when the company was owned/operated by Vern Estes. There was a marked change in the appearance, quality, quantity, direction, etc. of Estes products after the buyout from before. I got started during the Damon period so it's hard to speak firsthand, but I've talked to people about and read alot about 'the old Estes' and there were a lot of changes, both good and bad. Overall I didn't see it as a bad thing, just different, but then again I wasn't accustomed to the 'Vern Estes' Estes either, so other's will probably differ. I HAVE seen and experienced the difference between the Damon Estes and the current post-Damon Estes and I personally feel there has been a reemphasis that I don't particularly care for personally, but that makes sense to their board of directors/parent company and makes a good business case for them.

You're probably referring to my posts about my visit to Penrose and my observations of the appearance of their facilities and finding only a speaker and locked door and a semi-polite brushoff. Meh, that's a common thing now; direct 'personal' contact is out, even amongst individual people, so why should we expect companies to be any different.... I didn't mean to imply they were about to close the doors or anything, but my wife, who was a retail manager for many years, commented that the unkept appearance of their facilities is usually a sign of a business in trouble. May be a sign of a business about to be relocated to China or something... I don't know... But I DO know that it's an interesting contrast between the impersonal customer-disconnected Estes we now have (as others have pointed out in their elimination of their customer service phone lines to Christine ) and the personal friendly customer-oriented approach taken by Tim Van Milligan over at Apogee 40 miles away in Colorado Springs, and from what others have said, Quest over a hundred miles west or so, and from personal experience Semroc, who is also a VERY customer-service oriented business, as well as Dr. Zooch and others. IMHO the main thing Estes has going for them with most rocketeers is that they're the largest motor manufacturer out there. If it weren't for that, IMHO I think they'd be seen as a largely irrelevant 'toy company' by most rocketeers. Tim Van Milligan used to work as a designer for Estes, and I'd bet he has some interesting stories to tell, though he probably wouldn't...

Hope that helps... I hope some of the 'graybeards' will tell us more about the 'pre-Damon' Estes, since that was before my time. Check out those catalogs at ninfinger, I've really enjoyed reading them! OL JR
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