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Old 05-01-2009, 12:05 PM
MDorffler MDorffler is offline
Craftsman
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Canon City, CO
Posts: 100
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lurker01
Mike,

You would be SURPRISED what made it from the Estes Dumpsters and the Old Estes Home / Estes Storage to private collectors ... you would be surprised.

Hey, Bill Simon had said that last year he finally threw away boxes of Estes records detailing the number of Estes kits manufactured though the years.

You mentioned the Astrocam and that 50,000 units a year were produced ... wow!

How about those 1960's kits? Kits that had to have hand turned balsa nose cones and hand wound body tubes like the BT-30.

Any idea what the production number of a pre-damon kit was? How about the Cineroc? How many of those were produced annually?

Thanks in advance,

Bob


Bob - no, I'm not surprised at all. And obviously you have intimate knowledge of where many of these items were kept or stored and were taken from. One thing I would like to pass on to the guys who have 'private collections' of Estes rockets, prototypes, photos, films, etc., is that in all likelyhood your collection contains one or more of these pilfered items. No employee has ever had the right or been given permission to take home items such as the original photo models, or kit files, or our large collection of scale data. Yet today the original models such as the Mars Lander or Spaceman, or the original Interceptor which were kept in the photo studio are now all gone. Most of the printing plates that printed the original instructions are all gone, and our massive set of scale files have been decimated. All of which has upset me greatly for some time.
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