Originally Posted by doswonk

DOH!! I had one of these back in the day - the AVI Astroport Encylog, not a large-bed scanner - and in a foolish burst of de-cluttering, disposed of it! What was I thinking? I suspect it was the last catalog to come out of AVI because shortly thereafter they went out of business. Had to have been back in the summer of 1978, or at the very latest '79.

I basically just wrote letters to every manufacturer listed in the appendix of the current (4th, I think) edition of the Handbook of Model Rocketry requesting a copy of their current catalog. Although I got a few "Return to Sender," it worked surprisingly well. That's how I "discovered" FSI.

Now I realize AVI was on its last legs,* and in fact one of the reasons I didn't care much for the catalog is that they were reselling Estes and (maybe) Centuri products I already had access to. One somewhat interesting point, to me, was that they were based in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, which was not that far from the Chicago suburbs where I lived, and we had actually stopped there on a family vacation a few years before to visit a museum.

As a very occasional poster and general keyboard jockey, I will refrain from giving any advice about scanning the Encyclog.

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* Being, of course, the final incarnation of the company that had started as MRI, which had become MPC, which had become AVI when the guy who'd started MRI and sold it to General Mills to become the core of MPC then bought up the remaining MPC inventory when General Mills bailed, which seems to have kept AVI stocked with product for a good part of the mid-1970s. But the vein was mostly played out by the time I got the Encyclog....which I disposed of.