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Originally Posted by mojo1986
I'm curious..................did Semroc actually have all of those engines listed in their catalog, including 'shorties', what appears to be 'shorter-than-shorties', and an 18mm 'D'? And who manufactured their engines for them?
And while I'm being curious, why don't we ever see vintage Semroc kits for sale on Ebay? I would LOVE to get one of their old Black Brant III kits!
Joe
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We did have all the engines. The Shorties and Micros were cut on a lathe to the correct size after they were made. We manufactured all our engines.
When we closed in early 1971, we did not go bankrupt. We went insolvent. Our accounts receivable were tens of thousands of dollars and our accounts payable were zero (except for salaries.) We were left with much inventory that we placed in a warehouse for the day that we could start the company back up. There was probably about 15,000 cubic feet of boxes of kits, engines, and documentation. Most of my early prized possessions (Rock-a-chute, catalogs, MRN, etc.) were in a footlocker. On April 4, 1984, a tornado hit the building and left nothing behind. Everything was scattered over a three mile stretch of mostly swamp land. I never found anything intact, including the footlocker. That killed any chance of restarting Semroc.
I did have a small box with a few copies of our documentation, some catalogs, a few chutes, several nose cones, and a sampling of the evolution of our engines. I had pulled this out of storage years before the tornado to show some friends at Telex. The stuff from that box is about the only surviving pieces of Semroc.
The engine machine and nose cone machine were stored in a separate location that was missed by the tornado, so they still survive, although neither is servicable. There is some nostalgia value to me, so I keep them anyway.
I know if I saw some of the original kits on eBay, I would buy them. When I started the mad buying spree for old kits on eBay from 1998 through 2002, I was looking for old Semroc and some of my favorite old kits from all the early companies, it became apparent that with Semroc having less than 1% of the market, there would not be any kits that would be surviving. Even finding an early RDC was almost impossible and they had much more market share than we did.
I do not have anything left from the Black Brant III. It was our last kit and for some reason, I missed pulling any of the instructions, decals, pattern sheets, or anything concerning it from storage.