K'Tesh,

I have very fond memories of Carl and one of the things I most admired about him was his engineer's desire to "get it right." Carl made significant effort to make Semroc's Retro-Repro kits as exact to the original as he could. In fact, on many occasions he borrowed kits from a number of us on this forum to be sure his versions were dimensionally accurate. I also remember a number of conversations we had about which version of a kit he would replicate (plastic vs balsa nosecone shape, etc.).

But to be sure I wasn't misremembering I contacted Bruce as to whether the kits were intentionally altered from the originals. This is what he responded:

"No they were to original spec. We changed some materials in the kits of course to make them better like adding Kevlar and such. The instructions were never copied they were all done from scratch to make them better. The kits had not been produced for many years so they did not have them in commerce which meant they were available. Most of the dies and all parts and instructions were thrown away by Estes. Never any legal battles for us."

So if you find that the Semroc kit fins for the Bluebird Zero are different from the original Estes kit, I'd be very surprised.

-my thanks to Bruce for his response and to his Mom and Dad for all the great memories they provided.

Steve