Centuri cloning
 

I would like to see pics of the Centuri rockets that any and all of you have cloned. Right away. Don't delay. :cool:

These are some of mine.

My avatar is my Blast From the Past Space Shuttle - does pre-fab count???

As long as it's a rocket, I'm interested. I've got one of Mike's shuttles 75% finished myself. I'm a little worried about flying it, but only because I don't trust my own building skills.

Flew mine first time on one of the last C5-3s I had stashed away. I angled the rod too much and it had a downward ejection. The booster flew farther than the orbiter. I also did not sand down the dowels enough and the engine pod caught a little, causing the booster BT to flex and strip off a line of paint over the spiral. Have flown it on a C6-3 and it's nice. I overpainted mine so the glide times are not phenomenal, but stability on boost doesn't seem to be an issue. Sure hope Mike gets his kits back into production; the upscale looks to be a beauty.

Even though I've built and flown my own Mach 10 and Mach 10D, I'd still like to see what the BFTP Mach 10's are like. I hope he gets back to producing them also.
BTW, I have another Mach 10 on the build pile as I type. It gets in your blood once you have a successful flight with one. I need to make another M10D also.

OK, here are my Enerjet SR1340 and centaur clones.

Here are the Centuri clones for me.

SST Shuttle: top, bottom and side views

Vulcan

13MM Point. Had a nose dive so the nose cone is now rounded a little

Technically, mine dosn't count, as it's not a clone. - I bought the kit from ACME many moons ago. It's flown 5 or 6 times, twice succesfully. It power pranged on it's last fligh. you can see some of the crumpled tube just forward of the wing :(

Sean

Acme?

ACME Rockets "A Grand Old Name In Rocketry" was their slogan.
Grant Boyd (ex of Centuri) aparrently ended up with a lot of old Centuri
kits and parts (as well as some Estes), and for while in the late 80's/early 90's had a mail order business going.
He advertised in American Rocketeer/Spacemodeling. His prices were a bit high (for then),
but he had alot of stuff you couldn't get anywhere else. I think I paid $17.00 for the Mach 10
kit in 1988.

Sean

1988? Geez, I was still single then. (And six years away from rediscovering the hobby.)

I was still single too, and subsidising ACME and Commonwealth Displays ;)

You should have called. I was approaching my mid-20's and probably would have been receptive to getting back into the hobby. I actually kept in touch with rocketry just by grabbing an Estes catalog and checking out the stock at our local Johnny's Toys. I'd occasionally pick a rocket up, but I lacked the interest to finish them. I'm still hoping to find the Centuri Mini-Dactyl that I bought for under a buck at some point in the 80's. I know it sat on my bookshelf in my parent's house before I left.

Ahhh, the Mini_Dactyl. Thats one kit that I never picked up, tho Commonwealth had them for a while. One of these days I'll scan one of the old ACME and Commonwealth price lists, and send it to Scott to post. 'Course, it'll probably send half the group into severe depression when they see the prices....

Sean

The only two I've cloned so far, Thunder Roc in production. I'm also considering a Jayhawk (not Magnum); I had one of those in my teens too. The decals will be difficult though. There's white print in them.

I still have an original Jayhawk, but it's in rough shape. I launched it once since rescuing it for a bargain rate on Ebay, but it landed hard and bent a fibre fin and lost one of the little fins from up front. I don't have a pic of it, but I'll see what I can do. It's one of four original Centuri kits that I own, along with an unpainted Mach 10, a Screaming Eagle, and an as yet unbuilt Buck Rogers bad guy ship.

The only centuri rocket I've cloned so far is the X-24 Bug. I haven't glide-balanced it yet, and it still needs a couple of coats of clear gloss. Pretty easy build once I figured out that the nose cone from the Estes Yankee was virtually identical to the nose from the Bug. Went together pretty quick too. I think it will be a lot of fun!

Heh, ya, I've seen some of their old ads. I'll let you know when I'm finished building my time machine. ;) I'm going to go back and buy up a few cases of Centuri 1/45th LJ II's. :D

I believe the ALPS printers can do white. Phred at Excelsior or Tom at Tango Papa can do them for you.

Nobody has any interest in the SST Shuttle?

It was Centuri's answer to Estes Orbital Transporter. The hardest part of cloning one is making the ramjet nose and tail cones. You can buy them from Moldin' Oldies but I thought I would try to make my own.

I'm still thinking about them. :rolleyes:

The rest of the rocket is done except for them.

That's a beauty. I like the look with the balsa cones. I have thought about the parts set from Moldin' Oldies for this one, too, but my to build list is still too long now. It would be nice to have a drag race with the OT.

Temporal Machinery
 

Dude, you've *got* to let me borrow your "Wayback Machine!" (I plan on cleaning out my local hobby shops of original Centuri supplies... *after* I lost interest in the hobby, of course, so I don't accidentally disrupt the entire Time-Space Continuum...

Cheers,

--Jay

I had an original SST Shuttle "back in the day," and while I managed to buy the original Centuri plastic nose and tail cones (yes, all of them) from Mike Hellmund a few years back, I hate to admit that Mike Jerauld of "Blast From The Past Rocketry" has been hanging onto them during his house remodel/Cub Scout leader/NSL 2005 "enduro" session. :(

Just haven't made the full circle yet.


Cheers,

--Jay Goemmer
"Centuri Guy"

Hehe. Ya, it would be nice... I don't know about you guys, but I still have dreams of walking into a new (old) hobby shop I've discovered in some hick town and finding the mother lode. Then the alarm goes off and ends that fantasy. :(

Hey, that's something I didn't know he had, darn. I bought up all kinds of funky plastic parts from him along with a couple of cases of D11-9's.

Up till around 1998 I was still able to get plastic parts sets for the Estes Sandhawk and #2001 Sat V along with the wraps from Christine at Estes.

I've had that dream come true once and it only makes you wish for it again even more. :)

Don't leave us hanging, tell us about it!!!

Sweet Bob! If you have a drill press and some patience you could probably turn some nice ramjet cones.

Here's a pic of my original SST Shuttle flown once. The glider is a brick. It has the glide slope of a set of car keys, but still cool as hell to fly. :D

LOL - It had to be back around 1989 or so. I friend at work mentioned a local hobby shop near his house that had a lot of "old" rocket stuff the owner was wanting to get rid of. He was friends with the owner and told him I was a model rocket geek. The owner told him to bring me by and he'd cut me a deal. We walked in and there was one shelf unit full of rocket stuff and my hands got sweaty. Some R2D2s, Starship Vegas, Mars Snooper II's,... Then the owner said, "No, the old stuff is back here.." He had a ton of old Centuri kits in two boxes in the back room. I bought them all plus all the good stuff out on the floor for 50% off the marked price. Many of the prices were from the 70's. It was amazing this place had been overlooked by Rich Junglas. At the time he was running postal model rocket auctions and had cleaned out many a hobby shop in SE Michigan of their old kits. Back then if you wanted something OOP you went to Rich.

That's my "dream come true" story. Now, everytime I see an old hobby shop I go in hoping it's another "Stoner's Hobbies". So far it hasn't happened again.

Awesome! I missed out on clearing out hobby shops in my area by a year. In 1997, Bob Craddock was in town visiting Kurt Schachner. Kurt took him to all the shops around SE WI and northern IL. They made some fantastic hauls on old Centuri and Estes stuff.

I luckily found PVHC (Penn Valley Hobby Center) before they found eBay and the internet. I made a number of LARGE orders with them in the late 90's and got a lot of cool old kits at discount pricing. There was also Earle's Hobby Shop out in Bellflower, CA that had lots of neat old parts and motors.

It only had those stick-on labels for the elevator adjustment.

That seemed kind of lame so instead I made a couple of balsa elevators and hinged them with tabs cut from an aluminum soda can. Now I can bend the elevators and have them stay where they were set. Once I have the glide trimmed out, I will run some glue along the hinge line to lock them in place.

I used to have those dreams all the time. They've mostly been replaced by dreams in which
I'm playing golf much worse than I do in my waking hours (and I'm a somewhat-less-than-mediocre golfer to begin with). Man, I pine for the good ol' days of Hobby store dreams - at least there was hope....

Sean

Ooops, forgot to mention the 'Golf/Rockets' photo wasn't taken by me - one of the CMASS members took it (maybe Bill Spadafora?).

Sean

I first visited Earle's in 1985. On that trip I picked up two Orbital Transports, A20 Demon, Bandit, Cherokee-D, Laser-X, Centurian, Long Tom and a bunch of other rocket stuff.

I used to make two or three trips to Earle's every year from San Diego. It was great!

Earle's is gone, now. :(

Bob

Ya, unfortunately they folded. There's that dude on eBay that bought out the stock from Earle's. He goes by Bellhobby or something similar to that. I've found he likes to over charge big time on shipping.

That is a sweet rocket. I never saw one in person. I just saw pictures in the catalog. I had intended to get one to go along with my Orbital Transporter but never got around to it.

Thanks Bob. All three kits in that photo were ones I grabbed at Stoner's Hobbies. BTW - I tissued all the balsa on that SST Shuttle and that made it a lot easier to build. I highly recommend that practice for any kit with a lot of balsa surface like the Estes Skydart. You get a nice smooth surface in a fraction of the time, plus it adds strength.

Wow, that brings back memories. It was the first higher skill level kit that I ever built, second only to the Estes Space Shuttle (ET & SRB version). I lost the shuttle on a flight once, so I removed the shuttle's coupler mount and replaced it with a cone. I had many flights after that. I really liked the horizontal recovery mode! :)

Ok,

How many people remember this one? Quite a few I would suspect.

It was a rainy day today so I built this rocket from start to finish.