Originally Posted by Mark II

From what I have read, Estes motor shipping tubes were just a smidgen larger on the inside than the diameter of the 18mm motors. I would think that it would have been too small to accommodate a 21mm FSI motor.

Originally Posted by vulcanitebill

This is my memory of it as well. Most of my early flying was about 1965-1969. I built a Ranger back then and launched it with both series I and series II B's. Those were the thick walled engines and a B filled the available space, no room for enough propellant for a C with delay and ejection charge.

I remember when the Big Bertha came out, one of my friends built one. It did have the low and slow majestic flight characteristic, and I wasn't interested in it for that reason. Plus it wasn't very sleek with the blunt nosecone. Nowadays a BB would fly very well on a modern C engine. I'm actually planning to build a BT60 rocket, maybe a Vagabond, to use for D12 motors.

We built models with the BT10 and BT30 tubes in those days. I had forgotten about the BT40 tube but I still have one model made with it, the BT40 is not much bigger than the BT20 motor mount tube. I remember when the BT55 tube came out and I built a scratch built design with it. I thought this was a good tube for a B, slightly faster than a BB.

Estes didn't have C single stage engines back then but at some point in time we discovered FSI engines and they had a C. It was bigger than 18mm, maybe 20mm or 21mm. I tore the motor mount out of my BT55 model and made a motor mount just to fit the FSI engines. Now that I think about it it might have used the BT40 to hold the motor.

As a kid we had made our own launch system using dry cell batteries, so we could carry it out into my grandfather's pasture. When I launched my Ranger we had someone drive us to a different launch site and we used their car battery for power. This is another advantage of a single motor over a cluster.

Originally Posted by Mark II

Granted, I never saw an Estes motor shipping tube. All of my motor orders from the company were for very small numbers of individual motors, and they were rolled up in newspaper and packed in the box with my kit orders. None of mine were ever in tubes.

Originally Posted by foamy

I built more rockets out of the motor tubes than I ever built from kits. Usually of the one flight variety.

Originally Posted by foamy

I built more rockets out of the motor tubes than I ever built from kits. Usually of the one flight variety.