Totally agree with the above postings by DaveR and Blackshire.
They are spot on.
The customer is ALWAYS right and should be able to get what they want providing they are willing to pay for it.
As far as I'm concerned ALL the BP engine manufacturers have been unacceptably thumbing their noses at our requests for B14's and C5's for years.
All responses to the requests have been CRAP excuses of why they can't do it which have amounted to a huge load of baloney.

It would be nice if a brand X, Y, or Z would step up and give us what they refuse to.

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, and HAVOC !

I don't disagree with you, but I don't know if a larger product selection would necessarily "handicap" Estes with regard to their distributors. To give an example:

Just this morning when I had breakfast at "The Red Couch" store next door to my apartment building, Edith Desmond the owner asked me to go through her 2011 Estes catalog and select a few of the most desirable kits and motors for teachers and for her non-teacher customers because she will put in an order to Belleville Wholesale Hobby tomorrow. I had previously given her retailer order forms from Belleville Wholesale Hobby, a large distributor of model rocket products from Estes and many other manufacturers.

All told, Belleville's order forms (which total many pages) easily list hundreds of model rocket kits, motors, parts, supplies, and publications. They use the large product selections to their advantage by offering many different discount coupons to retailers (their envelope that I had given to Edith was literally stuffed full of retailer coupons!).

When I was an Estes Educator retailer, I bought from Belleville Wholesale Hobby, Commonwealth Displays, and other distributors who had large catalogs of all of their products. Maybe they "grumbled behind the scenes" about their large product selections, but the impression I got from all of them was that they were glad to be able to offer such a wide variety of products to retailers, in order to cater to everyone from the full-service hobby shops to the "dime stores" down to the one-horse retailers like me.

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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

Thank you. Also, the A10-3T is--if memory serves--a core-burner, so the excuse that "core-burners are too difficult to produce" is just that, an excuse. If post-pressing drilling to make B14-x motors is too troublesome, "pressed-only" core-burners such as the B8-x and C5-x motors would be perfectly acceptable. "President Stine, are you listening?" :-)

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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

The A10 is not that much of a core burner, and it is a small enough motor that the larger core can be pressed, not drilled.

B8 and C5 would be similar, but of course there was a run of C5 motors that had problems apparently because the pintel either kept breaking due to manufacturing stress, or getting chipped, causing a natural source for a crack in the propellant as it cured. So at some point Ed Brown or someone else at Estes decided they didn't want the hassles and just quit making the motors.

It probably didn't help that WalMart was on the horizon and wanted all the C6-x motors they could get their hands on, which probably put a squeeze on the manufacturing schedule.

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Roy
nar12605

Thanks for posting that! I couldn't seem to find it yesterday.

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Jeffrey Deem
NAR16741
CIA section 527

I think Estes did the right thing ignoring that "tail end" of the thrust curve on the A10, it's so little thrust that it's virtually a delay train. Maybe they should have split the differance and called it an A6.

http://nar.org/SandT/pdf/Estes/A10T.pdf


When we critisize these motor ratings, we should keep in mind that we have much better test equipment these days than they did when many of these motors were first produced,
I think the first published thrust curve of the A10 barely registered the end of the curve.

However I can't seem to find the original curve, And Estes has since revised it.

I'm glad to see the forum was able to help you gain a better understanding.

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Jeffrey Deem
NAR16741
CIA section 527

I tear up more boost gliders with a B4-4 than I do with a B6-4

Jonathan