In the spirit of this thread I thought I'd post a few kits that didn't make it. In the early 90's I was working on the side at THOY mainly helping with cutting and prepping parts. Fins and rings were cut in house. Fins with a band saw and rings with a series of fly cutters on a drill press. We also cut tubes to length with jigs on a drill press. We also made some of the nicest nylon chutes available at the time. Fun work and I really treasure those memories with Rich, Jackie, and their daughters.
Rich had wanted to get into the smaller kit market and asked me to come up with some designs that flew on 18mm motors. I came up with and prototyped seven. Rich liked them all and decided to kit four right away. He wanted to debut them at the Chicago show that year. Those were the Taz, Macron, Thura, and Cluros. To this day I still suck at naming kits. A couple of the names I borrowed from the the John Carter of Mars book by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
There were three that didn't make the initial cut. A scale Nike Smoke, a futuristic design called Tavia, and a rear engine BG called the USS Intrepid. I still have the prototypes of those three. The Nike Smoke is still unpainted. It didn't make production due to the nose cone. The prototype cone was turned from pine on Rich's lathe. We didn't want to do that for production and he hadn't found a source for them. The Intrepid operated much like the Sky Dart and flew great. I demo'd it at NARAM 34 and it got a lot of positive attention. It needed more work on the elevon release and we just ran out of time. The Tavia also flew great, but I think Rich was holding it back to see how well the first four did.
I left THOY just before the Chicago show when I became too busy at work. Rich told me later the show went well for him and the four initial kits went into production. He did say Estes accused him plagiarizing one of their designs. ^_^ This would have been right around the time they were feeling threatened by Aerotech, so they were probably feeling defensive.
I believe it was about a year later when Rich sold THOY to Rocket R&D minus all of the 18mm kits and parts. I think Bob Jablonski purchased the 18mm stuff, but he can confirm that. Here are a couple of photos of the Tavia and Intrepid. The plans for the Tavia are online
HERE . Maybe this will motivate me to finish the Intrepid plans.