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Old 08-21-2018, 01:51 PM
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Royatl Royatl is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Atlanta, GA
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Default How Many Motors?

Pardon me for writing down this mind exercise.

At the NARAM 60 Rocketeer Reunion, Bill Stine recounted the creation of the hobby up to the point when Vern created Mabel, then performed a sound experiment on the crowd where he dropped BBs into a metal pail, each BB representing 100,000 model rocket motors made since then. He said the final cacaphony represented a total of 500 million motors produced (someone heard him say 50 billion, but I'm quite sure that was a gross error) since January 1959 when Mabel I went online.

The Estes Catalog is a marketing piece, not necessarily an accurate source of company data, but it could be used to corroborate the numbers and give us an idea of How Many Motors have been produced.

So here's what is in the catalogs I have access to at the moment. Usually the verbiage is "consistent and reliable in more than X launches".

1969 14000000
1970 20000000
1973 40000000
1974 50000000
1981 175000000
1991 300000000
1996 300000000
1997 300000000
2005 310000000
2007 315000000
2010 400000000
2014 275000000

Where did they get these numbers, and what happened in 2014 to have the numbers revised downward?

from 1969-74, it appears an average of 6-7 million motors were produced per year. These years correspond to the first golden age of model rocketry.
Yet it appears that from 1974 to 1981, nearly 18 million motors were produced a year, then there was a slowdown from 1981-1991 when only 12.5 million motors were made per year.
Of course there was that infamous dead spot in the 90's were no one launched model rockets (everyone was doing high power??).

Then a tiny increase until the late aughts.


Ok, so Mable I made a motor every 5 seconds. New machines make them every three, and the one we saw on the Estes tour makes two motors every three.

So Mabel 1 was able to make 720 motors an hour, 5760 in an eight hour day, 1.5 million in a year of work days.

The Mabels that went online starting in 1969-71 could make 1200 motors an hour, 9600 a day, 1.9 million a year. The Double Mabel we saw can make twice that.

That doesn't subtract the approximate 3% used in testing.

There are seven machine buildings at the plant. Apparently only six have operating machines at the moment, and it appeared that the Double Mabel was the only one operating that Monday we were there. Ellis Langford confirmed that despite rumors, they never operated 24/7.


if, from 1970-2018 all seven machines ran at full capacity for one shift per day, you'd have 720 million motors. If you take into account the 3% and unexpected downtime, then yes, 500 million does seem reasonable

If you take into account a few years of Centuri machines running in the early 70's, a few years of one to three Quest machines running in the 90's, whatever the production of WECO and Sachen Fuerwerks, and Sky in China, you can even take into account the current slack at Estes (due to the skeleton crew for the recent past), so 500 million doesn't sound so off.


So again, what happened in 2014 for Estes to revise the number downward?

Maybe some data said that 1.8 motors are used per launch of a model rocket? Yea, all those two stagers and clusters going off everywhere!! That's the ticket.


Thank you for your time.


Roy
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