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Originally Posted by astronwolf
Hopefully they increase the quality of the kits. I won't be clamoring for their return unless they get a significant rework. Quest kits have always just seemed so shabby to me. Bent fin units, defects in nose cones, horrible parachutes.... You really want this crappy stuff back that bad?
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Not having bought their kits steadily over time, but at intervals, that may have been a "phase" they went through. With one exception (described below), all of the Quest kits that I've bought have been of excellent quality. While I would prefer the harder, brown virgin kraft paper body tubes (which have longer fibers than the chopped fibers in the white recycled kraft paper body tubes), that isn't a Quest "failing," because even Estes, Semroc, and other model rocket manufacturers now use the good-but-not-great white recycled kraft paper tubes (it could be a matter of price and/or availability from the tubing manufacturers). Also:
The only feature of their kits that didn't work well (except in their larger-diameter rockets), but which was easy to remedy--and that Quest changed afterward--was the plastic "gripper tabs" on their parachutes. They initial ones were the same self-adhesive plastic hangers that are stuck onto the wrappers of candy bars that are sold in vending machines. The shroud lines were tied through the tabs' pre-punched holes. In 30 mm and 35 mm kits, they worked just fine, having plenty of room inside, but their narrower-diameter (20 mm and 25 mm) rockets couldn't accommodate them (the 'chutes could be crammed in, but deployment failures and/or singed canopies were frequent results--the original gripper tabs were okay in streamer-recovered kits, though, because only one was used), and:
I simply cut away all of each gripper tab except for the adhesive-covered rectangular area, rounded off the corners, and then punched a smaller hole through each tab after pressing it into place on each corner of the canopy. These modified parachutes fitted nicely in even their narrower rockets. Later, Quest themselves introduced a smaller, thinner gripper tab which worked--and works--like a charm! In addition:
Their combination Kevlar/elastic cord shock cords, which are anchored to the motor mount (or to a builder-notched thrust ring, in their minimum-diameter rockets) were/are a major innovation. While the Kevlar can "zipper-cut" the top end of the body tube after late (or too-soon) ejections, constructing the entire composite shock cord so that the Kevlar/elastic cord knot is below the top edge of the body tube (this can easily be done by "feeding" the Kevlar cord out through the rear of the rocket--their kits might even be set up this way now) prevents "zippers." (If the Kevlar *does* protrude above the top edge of the body tube, "weaving" it through two or three holes in a rectangle, square, ellipse, or disc of card stock or folded-over masking tape [in the manner of the Stine "Shock Lock"] also prevents "zippers."