The rare case where the car is a fire hazard to the rockets....
The second part and sequel to the Talk about "go"! My 50th anniversary in model rocketry this time from the ‘90s on….
It’s not what you see outside but what’s inside that counts….
I find myself on a weekend deep in the middle of sunniest June 1994 on a daylight savings evening. I’m down in the basement of Mom’s farmhouse. I pull a big old toy box out from underneath my old workbench. I open it up and get reunited and reacquainted with my model rockets and equipment. Some were fondly remembered. Others were vaguely remembered or forgotten. I have my launch equipment and old engines, including some in ‘70s Estes diamond packs, nicknamed after the shape of the box. More engines and the old blue pyrogen dabbed on nichrome wires igniters were in old recipe boxes that had their ’40s and ‘50s litho-tin floral prints spray painted battleship gray to look more like real grownup official rocket equipment. I’m reunited with my Centuri Orion and Estes Big Bertha. I was wondering, like weren’t you an inch or more bigger in diameter and a few inches longer?
I got my old rockets out after a year of having dreams about getting them out and flying them. Dreams are one of two things that will intertwine with the hobby. The other was that Comics career that wasn’t.
I’ve been knocked around a bit in life since my last launch and packing the rockets away. I dropped out of Iowa State twice because of undiagnosed AuDHD wasn’t understood and getting unfavoritism for being different than the others instead of special needs support. I did help Pat Moriarity and Quarkstomper started with their comics careers while there, but I think that they were talented and ambitious enough to do it without me. I got stuck on the farm because of the Farm Crisis and was missing out on all the great Indie Comics and Alt Rock scenes that were happening elsewhere hundreds of miles away. I wanted to escape by doing my Small Press Comics and hoping to snag a successful Indie Boom gig, but got the short end of toxic gatekeeping and a mobbing by overly cliquish fandom and prodom. All three of my remaining grandparents died within a 16 month period. The family tractor dealership withered without Grandpa Skow and Allis-Chalmers. After a bad round of adopted child rejection trauma in and around the ’87 Chicago Con, I went to IWCC and picked up the pieces and an associate’s degree in electronics. I took a CAD course and an early version of my InterStellar OverDrive comic was an A journalism project during the final semester. An ISOD comic book was then ingloriously flunked in the Direct Market with schadenfreude from the Des Moines fanboys to Capital City Distributers. A potential revival of ISOD with another artist fell apart and ended with insult to injury with that artist giving me mobbing #2 with his rumormongering that made me a persona non gratia in the local fan scene. This hurt badly enough that I dropped out of fandom for the good part of two decades. The farm was rented out. I finally got off the farm and moved to Omaha. I got a certificate in commercial art. Dad died. I shuffled through jobs like nuclear bowl jumping and assembling tractor radios before finally settling in doing the lion’s share of old school wax and glue paste up with a company that printed the lion’s share of thermographic business cards in town. Rip Off Press optioned another revival of ISOD and then decided to sit on it for a year because of a softening market, which opened up time for model rockets.
Cold war space curio and could have been: The Soviet Buran Space Shuttle.
Quite of few things happened in real space during that time. Skylab burned up and unfortunately was remembered for that instead the research and records it set. Unmanned probes sent back spectacular pictures of the outer planets. The US manned flight drought after Apollo-Soyuz ended when the Space Shuttle taking flight two years later than originally planned. While it didn’t live up to the hype of biweekly flights and low cost space delivery, it was still quite the technological achievement and a source of national pride. The Challenger disaster happened, which was the big generational trauma for us too young to remember Pearl Harbor or the JFK assassination. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched followed by a complex repair in space to fix faulty optics. It then sent back incredible pictures. The Soviets kept a more steady manned presence in space with their Soyuz launches and their space stations up to the long running MIR. The Soviets had their own Shuttle called the Buran. One unmanned prototype was orbited and the program was mothballed as the Soviet Union went into decline after Afghanistan and Chernobyl.
My first attempted launch as a born again rocketeer was inauspicious dud. I was out in a pasture after supper with a high school buddy and his son. I had a couple of my old rockets with old motors and my home made launch equipment all from the ‘70s. The launch controller, with my quick and dirty teenage soldering, developed an open circuit during the 17 years of sitting in a toy box. Nothing was launched that night.
I start hunting down hobby shops in the Omaha era. Hobby Lobby had two locations, one on south 84th and one on north 72nd. These two locations are long gone but the franchise has spread elsewhere in the city. This was also the tail end of the golden era of mom & pop stores. The best one was Bud’s in Council Bluffs, as big as any franchise store. It had a big side room where RC plane old timers could build and repair and trade tips and tell their war and fish tales. A smaller mom & pop, which was more like a dad & daughter, was Bel-Aire on West Center. They had loose parts in cigar box where I picked up some Centuri and other odds and ends. A shop down near where the old SAC museum was in Bellevue that had operated out of a basement of a dual-zoned home and had odd hours and left over MRC rockets. Driving by the real missiles at the museum made the model rockets seem so small and toy-like. Estes had even tried selling kits in unconventional places like comics shops and electronic stores in the ‘80s. Hobbytown USA had just one shop in town at the time on West Center near the old Hooter’s restaurant that Warren Buffet use to inflict on Bill Gates. Hobbytown was soon to get a pivotal reboot for the franchise with a new location and a new manager.
I start catching up with what happened in my years away from the hobby. CA, aka Super Glue, is now a popular thing, coming in strong with thick and thin “flavors”. Estes Industries still dominated the hobby. There was a new company called Quest. AVI Astroport with their old MPC inventory was no longer around. Centuri Engineering was also long gone.
Estes was going through what some could call a dork age. A lot of people were dissatisfied that Estes Industries wasn’t the same company that they grew up with. This is not a new complaint since even some old timers said that Estes was better before Damon Corporation, a medical equipment conglomerate, owned them. Now Estes was separated from Damon in an ‘80s style hostile buyout. The new owner was the toy executive that was behind the Cabbage Patch Kids. He had no use for science or a sense of wonder and just wanted to reduce the company to a bland toy line with ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) and R2F (Ready to Fly, aka: “Ready to Fail”) with just A8-3, B4-4, and C6-5 engines. Ability of parts became spotty, and those available were priced at starting at $2.59 each, including the smallest nose cones and body tubes. The Estes Designer Special box wasn’t considered a that much of a good of a buy, but at least it had a halfway respectable selection of parts. Estes relationship with mid-power manufacturer, North Coast Rocketry, was going sour and the resulting original Pro Series was being phased out when it came to big rockets. He was surly to the hobbyists. In my amateur outsider opinion, I feel that he should have treated them better throwing them halo products and other crumbs, like when then beleaguered ‘90s Apple had with their evangelicals, even if they could be annoying (c.f.: “if the next OS doesn’t support WXYZ69++ technology, this true believer is gonna defect to Windows! I really mean it this time! For sure! And then some!!!”) His personality caused many people to leave. However Estes could be contradictory with making some cool things from the Skywinder, a popular helicopter recovery kit, to the Astro-Blaster and Strato-Blaster, which were radio controlled rocket gliders. A couple of us local rocket enthusiasts intuited something was up and started snapping up cool discontinued kits that were still on the pegs while the getting was good.
Centuri kidded in one of their old ‘70s club newsletters that they haven’t yet became a P.O. Box in Penrose. That meant that between the lines that hadn’t yet became a lesser appendage of Estes. Yet that is what they finally became in their last years in the early ‘80s. Kits and engines were pruned and dropped. New kits started using Estes parts or were even became badge engineered from Estes kits. Some Centuri parts crept into the Estes line, most notably the ST-13 becoming the BT-56 body tube with a fitting plastic nose cone and a plastic fin can that went back to Enerjet. If Centuri had been still around in the later ‘80s I could have very well probably gotten back into the hobby earlier.
AVI Astroport dropped out of sight around when I dropped out of the hobby in ’77. There were even old timers’ tales sending orders in and that were never filled. This was not necessarily the end of their story. Supposedly somebody stopped their pickup by the place sometime around ’90 to check things out. The owners were having a big bonfire of their entire unsold inventory. The man with the pickup saved two pallets of kits and engines. Many of the kits and engines ended up back on the collectors’ market. The engines tended to cato after years of temperature cycling in a semi trailer through Minnesota winters. AVI’s old tooling would find a second life at Quest and FSI.
Quest and their recycled AVI parts and molds.
A new company, Quest Aerospace, left a first impression of being a cross between Centuri and AVI. They did get ahold of AVI’s old injection molds for plastic parts, the nose cones, the reducers, and the fin cans, even the fragile ones with clip on fins. They had some former Centuri staff and some people that Mr. Cabbage Patch chased out of Estes. Some of their kits felt like Centuri warm-overs, such the HL-20 to the X-24 Bug. Quest and FSI got split ownership of the old AVI motor machine. FSI had the machine while Quest had the operational documentation. FSI made 18mm motors for Quest for a while on an Indian reservation. There was a fatal accident with the machine and Quest moved to importing and rebranding German motors for a long while.
One rocket company that I barely missed was from Model Rectifier Corporation. The long running manufacturer of model train and slot car speed controllers and other electronics had a short-lived rocket line at the turn of the ‘90s. Their initial releases were bland undistinguished kits with just a nose cone and three or four fins. However their engines were reputed to be as good as any and their igniters were said to almost light even dirt. MRC brought in some ex-Centuri consultants to spruce things up for their Concept II line. This had kits from scale models of missiles to fantasy kits like a knockoff of the old Centuri Orion called the Iron Man. They added a gussied up launch pad that evoked a real one. Also of interest was their FX engines that were non-thrusting miniature ones designed to leave a smoke trail. It seems that the management didn’t have a clue in marketing them and cancelled production.
My second attempt at a first launch was after supper again with same high school buddy and son out in the same pasture in an overcast evening. The launch controller had the soldering touched up and worked this time. The first rocket was an old Centuri Micron on an old B6 engine. The rocket disappeared into the overhead overcast with just a flash and a pop. The next launch was a kit that I just bought new, the then popular Estes Skywinder with helicopter recovery. It came apart at ejection and fell down on its side while barely rotating. The mixed flights could have been a metaphor or even an omen of where I was going to go in the hobby in the years.
July 4th, 1994 with Mom and Jim. Left to right: Quest HL-20, Estes Skywinder, Quest DC-Y, Centuri Orion and Evel Knievel Skycycle, and Estes Trident II (aka “Bident”) and Mars Lander.
I was back into my one-man rocket club mode for Independence Day, 1994. I put on a show for an audience of Mom and her new boyfriend, Jim, a church elder and widower. I set up the six-shooter round rack and rack controller from the ‘70s plus a new Estes Port-a-Pad II bought from the Bel-Aire spare parts bin. I launched a combination of old and new rockets. The old were the Centuri Orion and Evel Knievel Skycycle and an Estes Mars Lander. (I originally planned to launch the Lander years ago on the big Bicentennial Fourth of July blowout but that fell through the cracks.) The new were an Estes Trident II (aka: “The Bident”) and the repaired Skywinder, a Quest DC-Y modified with a 24mm motor mount to take Estes D motors, and a Quest HL-20. The launch went splendidly to the delight of everyone.
I did get my first taste of aging and mortality by getting winded in the middle of running all across the pasture chasing a rocket down. That never happened in my teens.
I get wind of a club launch while I was jumping through the hobby shops. I haul my rockets and Round Rack out to the launch site located in a field east of a monastery out west of Omaha. I set up my gear next to the other pads. The Round Rack was a novelty. One guy even wanted the novelty of launching his rocket from it. I had some old rockets that people hadn’t seen in years, or hadn’t seen the first time around. I had an old Centuri Point, which was a rigid cardboard cone body that acted as its own parachute, and an old AVI Martian Patrol, which had the gimmick of carrying up two Styrofoam flying saucers that fluttered back down. A few people saw the Martian Patrol and asked “Where’s you’d get that weird Quest kit?”
My real eye opener was that the club was a Tripoli Prefecture. I saw my first mid and high-powered rocketry burning through exotic composite fuel with no previous idea that such things existed. The oversized, over-powered, earth shaking, sky-busting rockets daydreamed about during boring study halls now existed in real life! While I never got really bitten with the high power bug, I did daydream about making my own big rockets over the next few days. I even dreamed that I had built a four times upscale Centuri Orion that stuck up through two stories of the staircase of the apartment building where I lived at the time.
High Powered Rocketry started out as an outlaw activity and soon turned around and in a push to get legit. The Tripoli rocketry Association was founded with local prefecture clubs. Three levels of power certification were developed with tests and initiation flights to prove the flyer knew their stuff. TRA had epic legal battles with the BAFT to legalize the hobby.
HPR pushed hobby rocketry technology ahead because black powder model rocketry technology upscales only so much. Composite motors, similar to the strap on boosters used on the Space Shuttle, were developed. Reloadable motors were developed after that to keep the hobby from getting too ungodly expensive. Then came hybrid motors with solid fuel and liquid oxidizers. Electronic deployment of recovery devises came around with using altimeters followed with onboard computing. More powerful rockets needed through the wall fin mounting and other types of sturdier construction with new types of epoxy including some with micro-balloons to make them lighter. Rockets became built from fiberglass, phenolic, and even more exotic materials.
HPR had many manufacturers eddy off from the garage operations to a big brand name like Aerotech with their big line of kits, motors and reloads. Aerotech has sort of connection to Centuri. The original Centuri founder tried to start a high power company called Enertek in the ‘80s. I’m guessing that he wanted the second coming of Enerjet, a Centuri subsidiary that made bigger composite powered model rockets in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Enertek burnt through all the funds developing a line of kits and engines and even the famous Mantis launch pad, but didn’t have the money left to produce them. The Aerotech founders picked up the pieces and brought most of these to market.
I met up with John who was rebooting the Hobbytown franchise in Omaha. He was a former Estes employee, who exited because of Mr. Cabbage Patch, that really promoted the hobby. He was another Generation Jones child of the ‘70s who flew rockets back then like me. He became my best rocket buddy and a co-conspirator in my future attempted model rocket company and other projects.
The local zeitgeist in the summer of ’94 had a whole lot of us born again rocketeers coming out of the woodwork. Omaha finally did form a chapter of the National Organization of Rocketry, called ORC, Omaha Rocket Club. This quickly merged with the local Tripoli Rocket Association prefecture and became THOR, The Heartland Organization of Rocketry. John promoted the hobby along with the extra extraverted TRA prefect, the “Kung Fu rocket master” himself, Bruce Lee. Bruce would appear on a rocketry episode of Junkyard wars years later.
I got online at the tale-end of BBSes and later the Eternal September of early Web 1.0. I had access to Usenet and the group of rec.models.rockets. This was a one-stop place to for everything in the hobby. Even with the occasional Dunning-Kruger case “I wood like teh sektrit resippy 4 moddel rockit moters” and in-jokes like “where’s my t-shirt!” about a certain colorful character’s fumbled attempt to fix his reputation. My upcoming rocket company wouldn’t have worked without this place to make lots of contacts. Later on I would even the convenience of emailing CAD attachments to the manufacturer for laser cutting.
Nostalgia for the earlier days of the hobby came around with all those older rocketeers coming into the hobby and getting on-line. Well, the ‘60s and ‘70s had the Moon Race, a Science Fiction boom, Centuri, AVI, FSI, and Estes wasn’t a toy company surly to hobbyists. Word of mouth or Usenet sold many kits, with the checks and items shipped by mail. I even called up Grant Boyd, former president of Centuri out of the blue. He had a venture called Acme Rockets, apparently oblivious to elventy zillion Road Runner reruns, selling leftover Centuri items and other collectables. People were making clones of out of production kits. I blew up the catalog picture of the Centuri Saucer to actual size on a copier and reverse engineered a clone from that. I still fly this thing as a beater rocket 31 years later. John loaned a Centuri Quasar to me and I made resin copies of the fin pod inlets and nozzles. Resin casting was a common way to duplicate out of production parts years before 3D printing.
I loved this era’s incarnation of the Estes AstroCam. This version was a camera in a specialty nosecone that took a 110 film cartridge and snapped a picture in flight when the cone ejected. I took a lot of photos for a while. I was enthusiastic enough to build my own custom rocket carriers and a “RastroCam” which is an AstroCam modified to be rear facing. I even launched the AstroCam on the D-powered Estes Maniac, a kit, which traced back to Centuri and Enerjet. The ground-based part of my forthcoming kit-cards was based on an Astrocam photo of southern Omaha. I finally did lose interest in the AstroCam after taking a roll of photos of blurry halves of clouds.
Somewhere over south Omaha, a middle ‘90s AstroCam photo that got Pshopped into later kit-card art.
An interesting fad that peaked in the early ‘90s was RCRGs, Radio Controlled Rocket Gliders. Estes had their Astro-Blaster and Strato-Blaster and later Sweet-Vee and Centurian. Aerotech had their high performance Phoenix, and Future Flight had their tailless Klingberg Rocket Wing. Vector Aero had a super high performance Cuda. I miss-intuited that something as cool this would be the next big thing and designed a the Glider Slider pad.
Glider Slider, friend to all model rockets.
I started Holverson Designs with help from John, Mom and Jim to make the pads. Maybe the autie kid who was as much fascinated by launch equipment as he was the rockets poked through. Mom, Jim John and I had supper at a family restaurant to come up with the some details for the new company. Mom came up with the name of Holverson Designs. I sketched out a logo on a paper napkin as these things often go. I had the square H against the half-round D and then decided to make the H round so that the logo could have a purer form of an ellipse. I had an optimized rocket with a boat-tail and elliptical fins flying between the letters. None of us realized that it looked too much like something like the “Johnson rocket” from Austin Powers until years later when I saw myself wearing the t-shirt on a convenience store video monitor. I felt like face palming my self enough to almost be a slap. That Freudian slip of a logo was then quickly fixed.
The halo-product pad of these pads was the Glider Slider for the RCBGs. It had three launch rods that folded out. The middle one for the main launch lug on the glider and the two outboard launch lugs to guide the wings during lift off. It could also be used as a small rack launcher for three rockets. The more conventional Slider Pad and Slider Pad, Junior were spinoffs of this.
The proble was that I didn’t realize at the time. Model rocketeers don’t like the extra expense and steep learning curve of RC. RC plane guys look down on model rockets. That many model rocketeers that learn RC often “mature“ out of rocketry into RC. The 27MHz going on 72MHz electronics, while smaller than the Kraft bricks of the recent past, were still expensive and heavy before the cheap Chinese gear came in. And that by the time a person gets as far into the hobby as RCBG that they tend to build their own launch equipment.
The whole trio of pads, Slider Pad, Slider Pad Jr, and the Glider Slider.
The pads were painted red because Mom, Jim, and I all liked that color. Plus that color stood out in the field. The red used was Emergency Red, aka Massey-Harris red, another old tractor manufacturer. The “Did I tell you about my Grandpa?” and Allis-Chalmers Persian Orange weren’t in-jokes until years later. If I had to do it over again the pads would have been Persian Orange from the beginning instead. Then again, if I had to do it again I’d skip the pads and go directly to the rockets. Except that I needed to do the pads to get the experience to do the rockets.
I came up with a prototype companion launch controller for the Glider Slider to do small launch rack duty. It had the wires and clips to launch three rockets. The selector switch for three rockets was based on an in industrial fan speed switch. The controller had a continuity lamp for each rocket and had the placeholder nickname of “Myoo” for its three-eyed look. I decide that such a thing would be too much hassle to produce.
The summer of ’95 comes around. Quest gets bought on by Toy Biz and the parts page of the catalog gets replaced with Marvel Superhero action figures. The Heroes World crash kills my revival of InterStellar OverDrive. John and I test out the Glider Slider with a Strato-Blaster and Rocket Wing. My pads go into production in the wood shop of Jim’s son. He had a business that made bird feeders and bat houses. While the guy was sharp, he cut woodworking jigs on eyeball and intuition and then scrapped quite a few that weren’t right. I would do a little extra measuring, math, algebra, and trig, and get it right the first or second time.
Mom was more aggressive in hucking the pads than I was. All of us made family trips to promote them. The three of us went down to an Argonia, Kansas launch where everybody stayed inside and didn’t launch because of 50mph winds. Our merry group went to the ’96 NARAM. I was actually at one of these meets! It was a fun first time event. I hucked pads, launched rockets, bought some few old Centuri kits and a new Edmond’s Aerospace Arcie which was a short run RC boost glider trainer. Somehow I missed out on bumping into hobby founder G. Harry Stine when the bumping was good to my later regret.
I took the Arcie home, built and rigged it. I splintered it on the first flight. I rebuilt it. I rebuilt it again after moving and cat damage. It‘s almost like the Theseus ship of RC boost gliders. I still haven’t flown it again.
I did all sorts of other things in ‘96. I was fiddling with ideas for model rocket kits for Holverson Designs, life beyond the pads. The local Tripoli prefect had an insane 4th of July party with car trunks full of fireworks. Shon Howell was going to get a Steampunk variant of InterStellar OverDrive published in his comic book A-Bomb, but the series was cancelled before I could finish the art. I was the first person from Soldier, Iowa to put up a webpage on this new and novel World Wide Web. I was cyber bullied before it had a name and, because we’re dealing with cliquish local fandom here, they solidly sided with the bully.
The Silver Hawk; what if a Pony Car came out in the tail fin era? Ironically I’m going to name a tailless boost glider after this car.
Things turned around in early ’97 after the downers of A-Bomb and the cyber bullying. Because of the early website, the Jordan Soldier Valley Telephone company in Soldier, Iowa hired me on for their position of computer and internet expert. I moved up to Soldier and got a starter home and soon two starter cats. I picked up a good survivor ’57 Studebaker Silver Hawk. I also had the opportunity to make a big last run of pads before Jim’s son closed the wood shop when he realized that he could make more money in a real job as a union electrician. I wish that I hadn’t took that opportunity and worked on the Hawk instead. What was supposed to be a two-month cold weather winter project with the pads dragged way into the summer. The pads were too much effort for what they brought in. I should have got the neglected Hawk on the road instead.
A squadron of early prototypes. It was almost like doing juvenilia with boost gliders while starting to push 40.
The move and the last run of pads put the ambitions for Holverson Designs kits back a year but I worked on prototypes with John. I had originally thought about HD as being a manufacturer of Science Fiction themed fantasy kits but I turned into more of a glider guy. I spent the year figuring them out, starting going through a lot of designs that didn’t work. I gravitated to the black arts of flying wings because I have a Atompunk streak and that tailless aircraft have a retro-futuristic look. I came up with a diagonally cut polyhedral joints to kludge in washout to stabilize a swept wing tailless design. I made umpteen prototypes to optimize the amount of washout. I worked on the Tangent and other prototypes with John. Knowing CAD helped a lot.
Holverson Designs “Black Cat Works” prototypes with Neko, an actual black cat, probably January or February 1998, or at least when winter was it its most gray and dreary and running on way too long.
It’s called the Swinger for a reason, baby…. Old web gif that I made.
I come up with the contrasting ideas for the Zoomie and the Swinger in early 1998 around the time that I dreamed that I woke up in the bardo. “Oh great, I’m dead and I have to figure out everything from scratch….” The Zoomie was to make as simple as possible boost glider, like an Estes Mosquito that glides back. The Swinger was more complex being a swing-wing rocket glider with piston deployment mechanism. Beginner’s luck and achievements in ignorance helped in this one. The piston mechanism was my conjecture on how the Estes Tomcat worked instead of the reed-valve system that it actually had. Because the swing-wing deployment couldn’t have dihedral I had the idea of putting it in the stabilizers. This kludge mainly worked because I unintentionally designed this what is called a lifting tail. Ironically the Zoomie needed 18 prototypes to get it to work as well as it’s even going to while I got the Swinger to work on the second try. I got 26 flights out of the first successfull prototype before it finally burnt the tail off but still glided.
The Swinger, fun with CAD.
A mock up of the Holverson Designs store display. All those HD kits on the pegs were Pshopped in. But don’t tell anybody….
The first set of Holverson Designs kits were finalized around the first five: The Zoomie, the Tangent, the Silver Hawk, the Wicked Winnie, with the Swinger as a halo product. The Tangent was more John’s baby being his idealized beginners and educational rocket. It was much like a fat Alpha or a short Big Bertha. The Wicked Winnie was an incongruous idea was also complementary with optimized elliptical fins and boattail rocket that was also a Big Bertha sized pay-loader. I was cannibalizing my own comics because Winnie was named after a character in InterStellar OverDrive. Flyers and store displays were made up to promote these five kits.
There was a good bit of nostalgia in these kits. They were balsa sheets and nosecones throwbacks to the time before Estes was doing R2Fs at the expense of real kits. There were love letters to Centuri, usually between the lines, but sometimes more obvious like that some of the decals for the Tangent owned a bit to the Orion. Some of the use of graphics, fonts, and ‘70s pony car boy racer stripes were throwbacks to growing up Generation Jones, the unfashionably late part of the Baby Boom that wasn’t really part of the Baby Boom.
I do wish that I had another year of experience of making kits when I made those first kits. A few things would be different. A lot of little details in the instructions would have been different. The engine hooks would have been made out of less flimsy metal. But paradoxically, I needed to go through the early experience before I knew that extra experience would have been nice.
The weird summer of 1998 blows through, much like the ground level wind shear that blew through Monona county and knocked over the landmark windmill that had been on the family farm for around 70 years. Mom and Jim got married, the second time around for both of them. I now have step-family. The small town phone company gets bought out by a unreliable regional carrier, and my career for the rest of my life gets laid off. This happens to be on the Friday before I leave for that year’s NARAM. I soon get the insult to injury that the remaining crew was hired down with the phone and internet service going to pot. The side hustle of the rocket company is soon going to be moved up front.
First five Holverson Designs kits.
One of the kit cards that I whipped up. These Pshopped together the old AstroCam photo plus two or three photos of the Iowegian skies, and a pirated NASA photo of the Cygnus Loop Nebula with actual nebula itself cropped off for nobody getting wise, plus other details when needed. Estes and Quest kit-cards were too gimmicky at the time so I tried to do something that would still look good hanging on a hobby shop peg 20 years later. I like to believe that I was ¾ successful.
I get a phone call from Grant Boyd the night or two right after being laid off. I was one of the first people that he offered his Acme Rockets inventory to. I turned him down because I had cold feet right after being laid off plus a lot of AuDHD choking up. I’ve since been mad at myself for not jumping on what would otherwise be a daydream come true.
I drive to the ’98 NARAM in Jim’s red F-150 camper special. I flew rockets and hucked the pads and the upcoming kits. These were a mix of fantasy kits and glide recovery with one fantasy kit having a flying saucer parasite glider, sort of a mix of the Centuri UFO Invader and Estes Orbital Transport.
Rob Edmonds saw my gliders and set up an impromptu and ad libbed air show for both of our sets of gliders. Mr. Edmonds had Edmonds Aerospace, his great own garage company that specialized in glide recovery kits. I am glad that he seemed to see me as a kindred soul and maybe sort of a peer. I feel that he was the much better designer being an actual Aero E and doing designs with an artistic touch while I feel that I was a half-bright hobbyist doing things with literally an autistic touch.
I come home from NARAM being treated as possibly the next great little company. This is contrasted with dealing with toxic gatekeeping from comics fanboys on Usenet before the meet. Although my comics meant more to me at the time, I walked away from the Usenet fanboys and obviously decided to chase the rocket thing.
Late ’98 waddles to a close. I alternate between freelancing and an actual employee doing photo prep, site maintenance, packing, and sometimes the chicken chores for Dugan Brothers, which were actually husband and wife with an in-joke name. This place was also in-jokingly called “Fredrick’s of Iowa”, being an online merchant selling stripper clothes and shoes back in the dialup days. I was working up the kit-cards, decals and instructions for the first five kits. John, being a former Estes education staffer, helped massage the instructions into something much better than they would have been otherwise. One early draft of the instructions that I tried so very hard to make come out really well instead came out clunky enough that I started me wondering if I had autism. Mom and Jim did a lot of extra legwork plus a little luck so that the Holverson Designs kits had engine hooks, decals, and color kit cards back when other garage sized model rocket companies didn’t have that stuff. The kits were pitched to distributors. John and I personally drove to Lincoln in my aging and oxidizing Sinkin’ Lincoln to huck the kits to the Heartland Hobby staff. We pigged out at this greasy Americanized Chinese Buffet afterwards. It didn’t bother me at all. John got diarrhea….
1999 comes around and I celebrate by building a Centuri Eagle Transporter kit that I had squirreled away just for that year. The Holverson Designs instructions with illustrations were finally finished after a long slog of being the first time around that I was doing this. Church tables were set up and loaded with parts in Mom’s basement. Mom and Jim had their senior friends came over and bag up kits for beer and fun money. The kits were boxed and shipped out to distributors and shops. There was some apocryphal story that Estes was annoyed at a distributor in Texas for carrying my stuff.
I get a summer survival job doing paste up at the Denison papers. I hate the 90 minute round trip commutes in the Sinkin’ Lincoln. I did see a jet crossing across the face of the moon while driving home late and I pretended that it’s an alternate 1999 with space planes going to the moon. The papers were dysfunctional enough that the parent company of the parent company, Garrett of USA Today fame, sends out a corporate trouble shooter. The Ben Franklin across the street carried a smattering of model rockets. So does the Wal-Mart on the south way out of town, which was the last place where you could get a pack of C6-3 engines for $4.95. I get hired back on by Dugan Brothers in the fall.
1999 RCTHA flyer for the lost eight HD kits. When things don’t go as planned….
I make more prototypes and work up new kits. I boil the next batch down to eight to introduce for next year, the big 2000. These were the Hyperbolic Tangent, Whorl, Sunspot, Scarab, Nebula Nellie, the Atomic Spacelines Starliner, the Star Blaster SL, and the Speedster. The Hyperbolic Tangent was a semi-educational extension of the original Tangent. This added a booster stage and a payload section. It was sort of a throwback to the old Centuri Power System educational set. The Whorl was a helicopter recovery model. I made up decals and John said that if they were any more girly that they’d have cooties! The Scarab was a reflexed delta boost glider with a vague Centuri feel. The retro Centuri feel also applies to the Sunspot, which was a nostalgic throw back with funky four fins and a nose cone sport flyer. The other four were fantasy kits all had a nostalgic pulp Sci-Fi feel to them. The SL in the Star Blaster SL stands Superluminal.
Getting in touch with my feminine side…..
Mom, Jim, and I pile into Mom’s car and make a few stops in across Iowa on our way to the ’99 RCHTA (RC and Hobby Trade) show in Chicago, Illinois. We visited the Herbert Hoover birth site. If that wasn’t Republican enough, visiting an older relative with a Conservative kitsch sofa-sized painting of Reagan in full cowboy gear. The obvious high point was a stop at Sig Manufacturing in Montezuma, Iowa. Sig was the big brand name in balsa wood plus had a line of model airplane kits and accessories. They laser cut the balsa pieces for the Holverson Designs kits. The three of us had a nice tour of the place. I saw their industrial laser cutter back when laser cutters were the size of desks and cost as much as a Coupe Deville. The company has since been bought out and all but disappeared in its move to Chicago.
Mom, Jim and I set up the Holverson Designs booth at RCHTA with display models of the old and supposedly upcoming kits. I talked to Centuri founder Lee Piester. He was delighted that about how Centuri, a shell company for tax purposes was now the corporate parent of Estes. Mom started talking with Barry, owner of Funcraft planes at a nearby booth as a possible suppler and soon to be partner.
The original sin of Holverson Designs was that the material cost of the kits was a quarter of the retail price instead of a one-fifth like conventional wisdom says but there was the assumption that margins would improve once economy of scale kicks in. Things trended the other way with nickel and dime increases from suppliers. What Barry offered was a cheap Chinese supplier. Yes, I did have back of my mind populist aversion to this but this had the added advantage that they would box the ships and others would do the shipping, which would free me from being sidelined by that and I could now focus on what I liked to do like designing more rockets. Plastic parts like nosecones were now possible. Barry said that he was making $300,000 a year with his company and I could too. Mom checked that this was for real. However, like the stock market, past performance doesn’t predict the future performance.
I had a bad dream on the night before the flight with Mom and Jim to Florida to meet up with Barry to seal the deal. I dreamed that I was standing in the driveway of the farmhouse and HD headquarters and watched in horror as a flaming KC-10 Air Force tanker came down overhead and crashed in the Loess Hills west of me. This was even more unnerving because this was before real life caught up with this with 9/11. I wondered if it was a metaphysical warning. I wish whatever forces involved in this would have used less over the top symbolism because I was worrying about the upcoming flight instead of seeing it having to do with the new company crashing and burning.
The real flight actually went well. So did the Mom, Jim, and me with the business meeting with Barry. The new company was set up. Names were shuffled through before one was settled on. Barry threw out Explorer Corporation and then the rockin’ Bad Company and Blue Sky. He finally settled on Fun Rockets. I worked up a rocket going past the moon based on the jet crossing the moon that I saw last summer. The kits were reworked for re-release. The first batch of prototypes was made of tung wood because balsa isn’t that native or common in China. Then Barry had the great idea of making the kits out of foam. “Trust me, kid, I’m making money on these foam planes, so I know what sells!” The first batch of foam prototypes were launched at the farm and failed miserably. I sent a long grocery list of suggested improvements back. The next batch of prototypes came right before the 2000 NARAM.
I drive out to NARAM. I find myself at the big national meet, in the big futuristical year of 2000 on Verne Estes’ own personal ranch no less! This was a counterpoint to Estes Industries being hostile to hobbyists at that time and not wanting them anywhere near the plant. Vern even stated that he regretted selling the company. I stayed in some midcentury institutional housing with a midcentury institutional green interior paint evoking the John Glenn era for even more of a Space Age vibe. I flew my foam prototypes out there. This may be one of the only times that a foam Swinger flew well. I flew my Space 1999 Eagle and Centuri Mini-Line clones and others. I hobnobbed. I saw the Rocketvision display. They were a nifty little company that made nifty premium rockets that looked like they’d be a hit but unfortunately weren’t. They had a launch controller that used a PIC chip to tell the difference between a good shorted and open igniter. I made early mental notes on how to do this with comparators.
I get back home and back down to business. I update instructions and graphics and other things. I inform Barry that the hobbyists would prefer a higher quality product because of what they’re use to from Estes and competitors from over the years. He didn’t think the market was really sensitive to that. Barry liked his FedEx so I made many trips from Soldier to their Omaha office in the Sinkin’ Lincoln, often to send $9.95 Zip Disks to him to forward onwards to China. I once waited in line overhearing a couple of young tech dudes talk about their big Linux projects. I wondered if I was in the wrong business….
Working prototype for the electronics for the stillborn Fun Rockets Mission Controller, using analog logic to tell the difference between open, shorted, and good igniters with a switch to make optional beepy noises.
Mom, Jim, and I got together with Barry at the 2000 RCHTA to show off the reintroduced rockets. Barry had me working on additional products from right before the RCHTA to wrapping over into the New Year. I worked up a rocket called the Black Bullet, after the Northrop prototype, on request. It was like the Infinite Loop style of rocket, named after a recursive routine in computer programming, which had short body tubes for fins. The old Centuri Groove Tube and the Quest Totally Tubular were like this, but my Black Bullet was Big Bertha sized. He now wanted some launch equipment. I worked up a “Launch Boy” mockup out of balsa and cardboard with some faux Bauhaus style. This was a knockoff of the Quest pistol grip controller of the time. This was sent to China to never be seen again. I worked up a circuit for a premium “Mission Controller” that could tell the difference between open, shorted, and good igniters with an ultra-bright LED for each state. That Rocket Vision controller inspired this, but I used an analog comparator instead of a PIC chip. It also had a 556 dual timer chip to make three different flavors of beeping noises for each igniter condition because a lot of model rocketeers like that sort of bells and whistles. I worked up a couple of launch pads. One was a purer form version of the Estes pad, which I called the Aero-Pad. Well, this was the jellybean era of industrial design. The second version had folding legs based on John’s suggestion and was called the Foldi-Pad. The pads and Mission Controller would have been in translucent cloud white and bondi blue drafting off certain a hipster trendy iProduct for the time. All of these items were doomed to become lost phantom products.
The Launch Boy mockup made out of balsa and cardboard, a knockoff of the Quest 9volt controller.
I had my brief glory days. I saw the Fun Rockets hanging on the peg at places like Hobby Lobby. This is back when that franchise had a whole pegboard dedicated to model rocketry with Estes, Quest, sometimes Aerotech, and another little company called Custom.
The mixed quality and reputation of the foam rockets bothered me. I didn’t want the foam to begin with. It was antithetical to what the original kits were. I expressed concerns about quality and was ignored. The reputation thing bothered me for deeper reasons. I had a bit of reputation of a druggy in school despite being Sunday school straight because of the all-natural “altered state” of being an undiagnosed autistic. The bigger sore point was having a bad reputation in regional fandom because of more neurodivergent bigotry against an outsider cartoonist, made worse when I became a persona non-gratia after the big guy in the clique rumor mongered against me. I did some self-depreciating humor about “cheesy foam stuff” to help cope went things were starting to get sour.
Hobby and other sales sagged during the early 21st century Dot-Com bust. The foam rockets were in stores but didn’t enthuse model rocketeers. The conventional wisdom was that the economy and sales would pick up in the new millennium fall. Members of the Omaha club that worked for credit card companies agreed.
Then the planes flew into the buildings.
While I was waiting for the Fun Rockets revival, I took a survival job at Compaq and moved down to Omaha for the second time. I was a homeowner knocked down a few pegs to living in the basement of an Aunt and Uncle. I worked a lot of overtime to find some token purpose in my life at the time and moved into my own apartment. I took the USPS ET-09 electronic technician aptitude test. I dominated the “unpassable test” but there were no job openings in the Homeland Security economy.
My artist’s concept of an A9 (stretched manned V2) in being launched.
John was working on a book called Spaceport Peenmunde, an alternate history of space flight based on real research and proposals from the original Von Braun German space team. John was avoiding the uncomfortable politics in this, but we sometimes ribbed ourselves with “The Middle Aged Boy’s Big Book of Cool Nazi Space Toys”. I was doing the illustrations in my poor man’s Mobius mode. While I was proud of what I did, I feel that I could probably render them much better today.
A9 cutaway art.
John was fixing up his house to live happily ever after comfortably with his wife there. That is until she left him for a man who played a Nazi in her community theater production of The Sound of Music. The separation and divorce apparently stigmatized John enough that he went away and never came back. Mom was surprised because she saw me moving in with him and us bacheloring together. He quit running the hobby shop and moved away to take care of his parents in The Villages in Florida. I gave him some Holverson Designs prototypes and display models. He did give me a big stash of old Centuri and Estes odds and ends, some that he rescued from the dumpster in Estes’ dork age. I later fished out a lot of pads and controllers and donated them to the rocket club to give to people that wanted to get into the hobby but didn’t have the launch equipment.
Wicked Winnie launching a Wickie Winnie. I originally drew this as a going away present present to John. He didn’t want this “porn” because he was going through a Born Again phase. The guy with him wanted it instead because he didn’t see many pin-ups of full figured women.
Wingding, one of my starter cats, comes down with Feline Immune Peritonitis and had to be put to sleep. This hurt because she was the first one to die on my own personal watch instead of a more diffused family watch. I set up Holverson Designs stage two on the company website to cope. Stage two was a little experiment at selling rockets online at deep discount while having no actual inventory. I would just drive over to the distributor warehouse in Council Bluffs, pick up the items there, and then ship them. This eventually piddled to a close when I decided this was too much hassle for too little money plus I could never get the official USPS permit to ship model rocket engines. Wingding inspired the name of a character in my attempted Captain Saucer reboot that didn’t go anywhere and the name of the Caliby boost glider.
Fun Rockets continued to fail. Barry said that he was going to look for a supplier of balsa to get the kits back to what they originally were. I did a thumbnail of an ad for the balsa’s back! He lost or couldn’t pay any longer for the storage for the foam inventory that he did have. These were shipped to Iowa and stored in Jim’s Astro building. Barry then dropped out of sight and communication. Mom and I spent the next couple of years selling off this unpopular inventory on eBay and elsewhere.
Thumbnail for a comeback that didn’t happen. Note: deletion of the Zoomie and the addition of the Whorl and Hyperbolic Tangent and the Swinger II.
This ordeal was bad luck disguised as good luck. My one big belated break in life ruined. This was a whole lot of time, money, effort involved only to be left in the hole never to come back. To state the obvious, I feel cheated to the marrow over this.
Before there was Barry and Fun Rockets there was another Fishman that gave me grief with what I sarcastically called the “Fun Record Store”. I was afraid to ask if they’re related at the time and I still don’t know. I sometimes wonder if this is some sort of cosmic prank played on me.
Somehow I daydreamed out loud of a revival Holverson Designs with or without Barry. I worked up Mark II versions of the Silver Hawk and Swinger. I worked up a line of kits called Space Cases. These were inspired by the original Estes Gooney Birds but pushed into Rat Fink territory. I worked up the cartoon characters and made some stubby proof of concept rockets. But nothing really fell together to produce those kits as HD or Soar Buzzard products.
Space Cases: Crazy Cosmic Commie Projectile, Capsule Hindered Insane Missile Primate, Unhinged Freaky Oddball, Not Always Sane Astronaut (bit of a spoof like an evil version of the ‘80s Estes Safety Tip mascot), and Victorian Electrostatically Repulsive Nonsensical Eccentric (sort of a proto Inventer).
My logo for John’s Rocket and RC plane company that didn’t happen.
John and I kept in touch with ideas of collaborations. He had the idea for his own hobby company called Soar Buzzard. I thought of it as a spiritual successor for Holverson Designs but I now see that it probably would have been its own thing. While the company would inherit everything HD, it would have new products from both of us and would also have some RC plane orientation. This got as far as a lot of talk and me drawing up a company logo.
I was toying with an alternate history of what if Holverson Designs could have lived on. Maybe if it had found some magical way to survive, maybe as a boutique premium maker with the laser cut balsa in the “die-crunch” era and other perks for justifying prices at five times the material costs. They would been introducing a broader selection of fantasy kits, gliders, and sport flyers. The line would, if given enough time “mature” into including RC boost and rocket gliders, and RC planes. These could lean into pure flight, clean idealized form for flying models that doesn’t necessarily look like full-sized planes, with going into extra pure tailless.
Then there is my possible alternate history of Fun Rockets. Maybe Barry would have found a way to go back to balsa or didn’t go with the foam in the first place. Or that the foam done clunky would have sold well enough to have foam and plastic done well in later products. Pushing this one way could mean scale models and Science Fantasy kits with exotic shapes and details. The other way is into the pure flight direction with super clean and optimized forms in gliders and planes. Imagine Barry making contact with a bargain electronics manufacturer and having R2F and ARF RCBGs and RCRGs. Then there is the lost launch equipment. The farthest possibility is importing Chinese model rocket motors. Or I’m living like a frugal prince on the $300,000 a year until I could save enough to build an US engine machine operation at where the surplussed one room country schoolhouse that was converted to a farrowing house use to be.
Sort of alternate history if Fun Rockets was more successful with these 3D recreations of phantom products. The AeroPad is in the back in some McTrendy iColors of the time. The FoldiPads are in front with the candy Apple colored one, a one in the usual Holverson Designs red, and evolving into Allis-Chalmers colored.
If a person was both cynical and pragmatic in the hobby business, they would go with planes and trains where most people are in the hobbies and overlook the niche hobby of model rockets.
I’m mad at myself for blowing an opportunity for a gig with Apogee Components. Apogee is a nifty company that sells their own and other companies rocket kits, motors, and accessories. These once included cool 10.5mm competition rocket motors that people speculated were of former Eastern Bloc origin. It is now owned by Tim Van Milligan, another refugee from the Mr. Cabbage Patch days at Estes. He does some of cool things that Estes use to do like the fun and informational monthly newsletters. He made an offer to me to help design rockets for the newsletter. I blew this because I had another bad case of AuDHD choke-up made worse because I was emotionally bottoming out in the post-9/11 dreariness, the raggedness of the endless 12 hour graveyard shifts at a dead-end job at Carly’s Computers, the failing of Fun Rockets meets adopted child abandonment trauma, and a dogpile other personal things at the time. Instead, an alter-ego did manage something as pointless as getting big and small pieces of Phat Grrrl art displayed at the first over SEAF show.
I drive Mom’s Continental all the way to the ‘04 NARCON in Wisconsin in the winter. The weather was a too miserable and windy to launch anything. I hobnobbed, showed off some left over display models from the HD days, and sat through a bunch of panels. I bought a miniature video downlink system that was deeply discounted. I drove back to Omaha in a snowstorm. I build a carrier rocket out of left over Quest parts around the video system. I flew it three times at a club launch in Pickerall, Nebraska in the summer. Then I got sidetracked.
After three years of management saying that if everybody worked hard without bonuses and raises now then things would get better after the buyout, the dead-end job at Compaq dead-ended under HP with the Omaha plant closing. So with uncertain finances and an uncertain future, I did financially questionable things like buying a good used Dodge pickup to replace the Sinkin’ Lincoln and take a big trip down to Florida to see John. I visited my birth family and sat with them through Hurricane Charlie. I visited John and his parents in the Villages. He toyed with a joint design of an ultra-light plane that was like a Jet Ski but flies with a flying wing planform cribbed from the Horten Brothers and a pusher propeller with lots of scimitar-like blades at your back. Like what could possibly go wrong? We had a launch together. A Silver Hawk Mark II boost glider stayed up over four minutes and was still gliding when it was lost from sight. I applied for jobs while I was down there with hopes of moving down to be partners with John. I even dominated several aptitude tests at a Sears repair center in Ogallala on the Friday before a hiring freeze on Monday. The job search didn’t work out. But at least we’re going to get back together someday and fly again….
I try on move on after Fun Rockets and Compaq and all. I barter the remains of Dad’s ‘86 F-150 as a potential rebuilder for some restoration work on the Silver Hawk. It seemed like the bargain of the new century at the time. I did some freelance illustration and tedious temp work in the fall. The Sinkin’ Lincoln, the house in Soldier, and a ’58 Chevy pickup that’s been a project since 1977 were all sold off as simplify and move on with my life gestures. I watch a DVD of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang over and over to help cope until I realize that my favorite childhood movie has quite a few warts. I get the message on the day after my birthday that I was finally hired on as an USPS electronic technician. I start on December 25, or technically report in on the Monday afterwards. This was one of the best birthday and Christmas presents that a 44 year old boy could have!
The Estes 261 catalog with rare Denver address.
A stepfamily couple was cleaning out an old desk at their house and came across an original Estes catalog from ’61. This was one of the earliest catalogs with the original kit line from when Estes was still in Denver before their move to Penrose. They gave it to me as a Christmas present. I put it up for sale on eBay a few months later. There was a weird bidding frenzy and the kit sold for a mind-bending $935! Just think that catalog could have gone in the dumpster they hadn’t have thought of me.
The absolute end of the rocket company came when Jim’s health was failing. Stepfamily stiff-armed Mom and Jim into starting a divorce that neither one wanted in ’06. This was to insure that none of my side of the family would get any of Jim’s stuff even if it were already in the will that it wouldn’t happen. This got me motivated to sell of the rest of the Fun Rockets inventory to clear out the Astro and most of the leftover parts from Holverson Designs. I kept some parts for myself for future building but deliberately sold off the rest so that I couldn’t get back into business. I didn’t keep any of the Fun Rockets products because I didn’t want to see them and be reminded. Jim’s health was really unraveling in the fall and he committed suicide at an ungodly hour before the divorce could be final. I had the unnerving experience of getting the phone call from Mom with the news at five in the morning.
Excess Fun Rockets inventory in Jim’s Astro waiting to be sold off. I suppose what’s a better place to store rockets than an Astro building? BTW, that’s the old Moorhead, Iowa jail cell that Jim somehow got a hold of in the back left.
I was doing well enough with the post office to buy a house in ’07. The place had a garage, patio, and basement that are good for the building rockets and other projects. I like to do building and RC installs on the patio table in the broad daylight on warm days. I divided the basement into two rooms. One was full of rocketry items succinctly dubbed the rocket room. I later set up a couple of church tables as workbenches in the other half for a temporary workspace for the hobby. This since became permanent.
I go to the ’08 NARAM in Virginia south of D.C. after a long lapse just for the heck of it. I drove out in my freshly purchased stylin’ low mileage black ’95 Riviera. I see an X-Cor rocket-racing plane on a semi flatbed on the way out back when that was being hyped as the next NASCAR for the 21st Century. The thing looked like a big Astro-Blaster. While it was a personal downer that I was no longer a merchant, it was a mixed curse that I didn’t have to huck anything and I stuck to the fun of launching and catching after hours panels. A high point was the manufactures’ conference with Quest introducing some new D and E engines. Unfortunately these were short lived due to the economies importing small volume items from China.
X-Cor rocket racer back when that was supposed to be the next big dealie….
I had a last go around with the comics. I did a web comic called Sci-Fi Guy! With a name like that it obviously takes place in the suburbs- of Iowa- during the Disco era. It was too big of a project to do as a hobby and I had one too many heartbreaks of the commercial recognition not coming. I since pruned down the art to just drawing for myself and a perpetual project in progress omnibus collection called Tube Punk.
Estes gets bought out by Hobbico, a maker mainly of RC plane parts. I do a retcon on InterStellar OverDrive for the heck of it. It’s now takes place in 2087 instead of being an alternate present. Flexia is now a working mother as the CSO aboard the L4 Space Station with three kids in tow. Her older teen daughter, Revellia fancies herself as more of a Rockin’ rebel than she really is. She’s a natural born polydactyl (before AI art was a dealie!) and will tell you so herself, before AI art, as sort of a simile to being autistic and that right-brainer quirk of having your ring and index fingers the same length.
I get a bug in me to build my on version of the classic George Gassaway Omni-Pad launch pad. My version came out being a bit of boat-anchor engineering despite being made out of aluminum from the hardware store and the recycle bin at work. All the shiny aluminum reminded me of the galvanized combines that Grandpa Skow use to sell, so I nicknamed the thing as “The Gleaner”. I probably got 20 times the effort than the thing deserves by doing various improvements in the thing since then. It’s gotten to that every time I get an idea for an upgrade for the upcoming flying season, I hope that I don’t get another.
The “Gleaner” Omni-Pad used as Gassaway intended even with a 3D printed metricified version of the head.
Mock action figures of her or her Mama or friends with accessories would be kind of cool….
I get into 3D printing. The idea originally was to make little action figures of Flexia and friends. It turns out that the technology is really great for making model rocket parts. Plus I could dust off my old CAD skills and develop news ones to whip things up in three dimensions. I could reverse engineer old Estes, AVI and Centuri parts, and make new ones of my own. I have posted many of these at Thingiverse, a site for that sort of stuff. I still haven’t gotten back to the figures like I should because I find the interfaces and learning curves in 3D figure software like Poser and DAZ are awful enough to make me want to beat the monitor to death with the keyboard.
Meanwhile, Quest gets bought out by Aerotech. Composite motors get scaled down to low power rocketry.
I go to the ‘16 WorldCon, the big Science Fiction convention, in Kansas City just to get that off the bucket list. The Bartle Hall Convention Center has an early UFO theme to go with all the Sci-Fi. I stay with two owners of what was left of Flight Systems Incorporated at the time, Blake at first and Dave later. This pair was hoping to revive FSI after picking up the remains for a song off of Craigslist. Dave and his S.O. went the extra mile to help out during my embarrassing little accident. I got a tour of the FSI shop while recuperating. I enjoyed seeing all the old John Glenn era shop equipment. Dave gave me a clone kit of the Centuri Orion and an old bondi blue Mac G4 tower that wouldn’t boot. I got the Mac working after I got home. The hope of reviving FSI died when Dave did a few weeks later. The Mac tower was named in his honor.
The bargain barter of restoration on the Silver Hawk went south after 11 years of bonehead body man breaking promises of getting right to it but letting it rot from great survivor to near crusher bait. He finally went DARVO on me and ordered me to get it off his place. This was an eye opener. For years I’ve been gaslighted for being the antisocial guy, but people were doing this mean stuff to me and not the other way around.
You know, I have a reputation of being anti-social because of the Big A, but I will never do this stuff to other people but they do it to me….
I had unintentionally dropped out of model rocketry but was lured back in during the summer of ‘18. A lonely rocketeer named Dan called me out of the blue. He wanted somebody to fly boost gliders and RC, which are sort of niche in the hobby and he knew that I was a glider guy from back in the day. We both even had the rare Edmonds Aerospace Arcie II RC boost glider kits. He even had a little gang that came out with him nicknamed the Rocket Rangers. We are still having a lot of little private launches across various parks and sod farms. The local club is very lucky to have access to the sod farms. These are like a quarter mile square mowed lawns. Even if launches sometimes have to be scrubbed or worked around a center point irrigator irrigating.
Hobbico went bankrupt and Estes was bought out by a family of affluent hobbyists. The company now has a slight yuppie boutique tinge to it, but they are producing scale kits of better detail and quality than ever before.
The Astradyne 1327 from my old Captain Saucer Small Press Comics.
Getting back into rocketry also got me back into 3D printing. I sort had dropped out because while because my first printer was too small, too limited, and used pricy propriety filament cartridges. I went to the other extreme getting a big cranky beast of a printer that could print half a meter per axis. I could now print much bigger items like display stands, Omni-Pad heads. I could even print out and see and hold what the Fun Rockets launch pads would have been like in real life. I posted many items at Thingiverse. I still haven’t done the Flexia & friends action figures, but I have been splitting the difference and those and rocketry by working up models of the spaceships from juvenilia and my Small Press Comics days.
I got another bug from getting back into the rocketry with reading an article about the early classic RC boost gliders from the late ‘60s Malewicki design and the Estes Skydancer to the ‘70s MIT student designs to the Flagship that wrapped into the ‘80s and recreating several of them. I built these while working on and off over the next five years. I still haven’t gotten all of them covered or rigged for RC yet, but they influenced on own designs, which did get finished and flown.
Recreated Skydancer recreated from old Estes plans but with 21st Century electronics. I still haven’t gotten up the nerve to fly something so involved and delicate.
Rocket Car in front of the family farmhouse that use to be Holverson Designs headquarters.
’18 also had me getting to live a childhood dream of owning a “Rocket Car”. Well, the car looked like a spaceship to me back when I was an overly excitable grade school kid. I bought a surviver ’51 Studebaker Commander Land Cruiser with only 41000 miles on it from the brother of a coworker.
I started getting interested in video rocketry again. I was buying $10 closeout thumb-cams off of eBay and designing 3D printed nosecones around them. I was about to give up in despair after all of several of the cams in a row would not charge and work, but Estes saved the summer with their rebooted AstroCam. This was a video rocket with thumb-cam that recycled the old name. The format moved to still 110 film to digital 1080p video stored on TF card. This was a high tech successor to both the old AstroCam plus the old CineRoc that a lot of kids daydreamed about but was expensive pricy and took pricy proprietary Super 8 film cartridges. I love these AstroCams and taken over a hundred launch videos. I started boosting them on Estes Generic E2X rockets because they’re studier than the rockets included in the kit and they evoked the original AstroCam rocket. I designed my own 3D printed nosecones to more solidly retain the thumb-cam after losing three cams in one season to the Estes rubber band arrangement. I followed this by working up my own AstroCam rocket called The Cammer with the name being another nod to being a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s and its Kar Kulture. It has a 3D printed fin-can for straight boosts, often only half a roll. I hope to post this at Thingiverse over winter.
Bellevue with downtown Omaha in the background as seen from AstroCam over American Heroes Park, August 2020. Note Woodman of the World and Union Pacific buildings on the horizon.
Here’s the tale of the sad little package. I accidentally dropped out of contact with John while printing up a 3D package for him. I let too much of time, about half a year, slip by while trying to print things. The printer would screw up badly, sometimes badly enough that I walked away for a couple of weeks at a time to cool off and overcome inertia. I had a big idealized list of things to send that I finally pruned down to some still pretty cool stuff like recreations of Centuri parts including a reversed engineered Powr-Pad to my own designs. I finally put together a surprise package to delight him to no end. The sad little package was returned with a note from his S.O. saying that he had passed away. He had doubly gone away and is never coming back. The package never got to delight him. The Peenmunde book will be an orphaned project. John never got to see my house and spread. John and I never got the inevitable getting back together at his new house snd fly rockets and RC.
Two weeks before I got the bad news about John, I had a dream about flying rockets and RC at his spread. `I hope that this was metaphysical but it’s more likely a weird coincidence. After all, this spread showed a lot of resemblance to my stepdad’s acreage and another acreage on a farm that my Dad use to co-rent in the ‘60s. I looked up a Google street view of his place and it was a tract house in a suburb and nothing like the acreage in the dream. At least this dream let me do something that’s never going to happen in real flight.
I forge and muddle along in this hobby after John. I play with my boost gliders. Dan gives me some wrecked indoor flyers with working UMX micro-brick receivers, which are postage stamp sized receiver and servo combos, to salvage for possible project. Dan suggested putting a micro-brick on an Apogee Condor. The Condor is a wonderful little boost glider. It’s inexpensive enough to be almost disposable, it’s quick and easy to build, and it flies quite well. I went out to my patio table in the broad daylight and set aside an afternoon rigging the first RC Condor up. I didn’t have high hopes because an experienced and respected old timer said that the thing would be too much of a brick to fly. It actually flies quite well! I went from Steampunkish to more straightforward linkages as I improved these little gliders. I ended going with elevon mixed ailerons.
RC converted Apogee Condor with UMX micro-brick.
I breakdown and get finally get diagnosed for autism after years of wondering and arguing with myself on whether I had it. This is right before my 61st birthday. It’s something that makes you wonder how life could have been different if that stuff was understood and diagnosed years earlier. Estes buys a company called Goex. Goex was the last US manufacturer of black powder and the Estes wanted to make sure that they had a domestic supplier.
I decide to go down to the ’22 NARAM as it was close enough by taking place in Missouri and it’s the most frivolous fun thing that I could think of doing for vacation that year. There was a 44 mile drive between the meet’s hotel to the flying field. About every day had a heat advisory and was breezy, but it was still a lot of fun. I flew my Tangents and CineRoc-Omega clones carrying AstroCams. I flew my AstroCam at least once a day and took my “along came a spider video”.
I finally overcame the quirk of never going to an odd year NARAM by attending the one at ’23 Lordsburg, New Mexico. This was a smaller NARAM at lasting only four days. This one had 100+° temperatures and first two days were very breezy. I was glad I wasn’t in boost glider competition on that first day! I did some sport flying. I even captured video from an AstroCam that separated from a rocket, spun at a zillion RPM on the way down, and got put into the indigo haze of inside of somebody’s shirt pocket. “Hey, this looks like an USB thingie!” “Yep! It’s an USB thingie!” I drive by the White Sands Missile Range and stop at the Alamogordo Museum of Space History on the trip home.
Mom’s house had a plumbing disaster causing it to be auctioned off with the acreage around it. This includes the little pasture behind the house where I launched rockets as a teen in the ‘70s and as a BAR in the ‘90s. The place that was once the home address of Holverson Designs was sold off forever. I tried to finish up some unfinished business before the new owners moved in by taking that AstroCam photo of the place that I couldn’t quite pull off in the ‘90s when Mom and Jim were together. This attempt was plagued with mixed luck. One thumb-cam was lost and the video on board with it. I did get in one more video in the too little time that I had. It snapped only ¾ of the house but I decided that it was good as I’m going to get in this life. I did get to show it to Mom.
¾ of the family farmhouse and former Holverson Designs HQ as seen in the bottom center of this AstroCam screen dump.
I go down to the ’24 NARAM in Pueblo, Colorado. This meet was centered on being a celebration of hobby founder Vern Estes while he was still with us. It was a big six-day event in contrast to last year’s smaller NARAM. I went down and did a lot of sport flying in weather that ranged from 100+° hot and windy to 60° and calm. I managed to get even more sunburned than I did as a teenybopper hoeing beans. I bumped into some of the hobby regulars. I bumped into former Omaha Tripoli Prefect Bruce Lee after him being out of sight for years. He’s doing well. I toured the Estes plant and launched a recreation of my first rocket, an Alpha III painted aluminum there. I got to pitch ideas to the Estes designer but none of them landed. I bumped into Vern and I got him to autographing my Alpha on the last day. I went to the banquet and hear Vern Estes giving a rousing speech and gave his blessing to the girls being the future of the hobby. Being at a NARAM, the Estes plant, and interacting with Vern Estes sort of brought this hobby sort of full circle for me. I got in eight boost glider flights in on the last day and managed to lose the last one. I reflected on how I did a lot of things that would have only been a daydream back when I was a kid isolated on a pig farm doing this hobby the first time around in the ‘70s.
Estes Headquarters in Penrose. I suppose that model rocketry is such a deep religious experience that the place resembles a Midcentury Modern ‘60s Lutheran church….
I feel sympathetic to Vern Estes. The ’24 NARAM was scheduled around him as his last hurrah. It was going to be the best one ever for him with his wife Gleda. She dies a few weeks before the event. Now it’s the saddest one ever with Gleda being conspicuous in her absence. Vern sadly declared that this was going to be his last NARAM ever during the banquet.
The Alpha III recreating my first rocket signed by Mr. Estes.
A RC boost-glider of my own design is the Caliby. The name is a tribute to my late Wingding, a cat who could shed in 13 different colors. The Edmonds Arcie II and the old ‘70s MIT designs influenced this glider, plus there’s a lot of myself in it going with the KISS (Keep It Simple. Stupid) principle. I’ve have made quite a few prototypes because the next design tweak is always supposed to be better. I’m so close but yet so far as it’s not quite finalized as this flying season ends.
One of many Caliby prototypes, this one from last summer. Note cartoonified Wingding on decal. Subaru Impreza for scale….
A spin off or the Caliby was the Calico as I combined two of my favorite things: AstroCams with boost gliders. This was a tongue in cheek reference because the early ones were rebuilt from wrecked Calibies and “demoted” from a caliby to a calico as they went going from RC down to ‘just’ free flight. This some got speciation into the Tabico as it became it’s own design with austere looking v-tail. I got a 70 second video flight from one of these.
I still fly despite that this hobby associates with loss. I retire after 20 years, one month, and one week at USPS and then Mom dies two days later. I go to a club launch in February on the next day as a move on with my life instead of staying home and moping. I don’t tell anybody there because I could handle the mourning a better by quietly not having awkwardness of having to talk about it. There is the loss of John and Jim. All the time and effort put into Holverson Designs and Fun Rockets that got nowhere. Great companies like Centuri and AVI no longer being around. I miss associated things like the Grandma and Grandpa Skow and the Allis-Chalmers dealership. I miss the wide-eyed youth and sense of wonder.
I made up a set of retro rocketry stickers to help cope with the loss. These reproduced or were new mimicry of the stickers that AVI Astroport use to give out. This was an attempt to grab a wisp of wide-eyed youthful 1975. This is even if in the back of my head, I know that nothing is coming back and those were mixed times.
I worry about the future of this hobby. The mom and pop stores are all but gone and the big franchise stores seem to carry a smaller selection of rockets with every season. The Hobbytown franchise that John started has grown into the Hobbyplex, with a huge school auditorium-sized room for indoor rc racing and flying, but treating the rockets like a red headed stepchild while having big promotions on toyetic otaku kitsch. I can imagine a death cycle of there being less rocketry in the stores because of fewer sales and less sales because there’s less stuff in the stores. Plus the age old problem of youth disinterest in the hobby “’cause there ain’t no ball in it!” gets joined with the 21st Century “it ain’t no app!” Anyway, I’m going to keep flying them as the flying stays good.
I’m enjoying retirement with hobby. I have no work, school, farm chores or parental nags getting in the way, plus I have a bigger “allowance” to do this rocket (and car and sometimes even art) stuff. I have more skills and the 21st century technology. I bought trailer for a place to stay up at Soldier and call it “Retro Ranch”. It has a bench duplicate set of hobby tools to work on rockets and planes up there. I’m working on getting a backlog of projects wrapped up and finally posted at Thingiverse over the next few seasons. Some of these go back to the prototypes and phantom kits of the ‘90s. I’m doing repairs and new builds. I’m looking towards next year’s flying season when things thaw out. I always seem to be fiddling with more prototypes. A few finally got finalized but the next version possibly being better trips up a lot of the rest. I skipped NARAM for a once in a lifetime opportunity to drive Rocket Car up an all classes school reunion and being in the Moorhead Community Days car show the next day.
A man cave corner of Ranch Ranch, with a vague approximation of my basement corner of when I use be a teen in the ‘70s. The “junior” bench is a smaller recreation of the bench that Dad built for me that was destroyed in the plumbing disaster.
I’m sorry this diary is a year and a half late. This was originally supposed to be finished and posted in the middle of summer to fall ’24 for my 30th anniversary of getting back into the hobby. The ‘24 NARAM sidetracked me and then did the election and other things, I had some AuDHD choke up and inertia to overcome, and sitting down to write about Fun Rockets was not easy. I originally wanted to do a 65th birthday diary but I realized it would only rehash the Big Six-Oh and Feirds diaries so I decided to finish up the unfinished business of this diary and talk about rockets instead. I also apologize for this running long but I’m writing about a little over three decades instead of the middle four years of the ‘70s this time.
Illustration for if this diary got posted last year like it was supposed to. With my various eras in rocketry over the decades.
Key to illustration: Celandine Bast from InterStellar OverDrive quasi-canonically aged up to late 30s based on a photo ref of a scary large woman. She got her Mama’s galaxy beating amazonian beauty without getting Mama’s galaxy beating metabolism. She’s holding either my first rocket or the recreation of it. There are four columns representing the rockets and launch equipment over the years. The first column is the ‘70s: Centuri Orion, X-24 Bug, and Big Bertha on the homemade Round Rack with homemade launch controller made from Radio Shack or salvaged from junk ‘50s long distance phone equipment with a ‘70s acid-lead car battery with the caps. Second column is the ‘90s with Holverson Designs Tangent, Silver Hawk, and Swinger, on the Glider Slider with the “Myoo” prototype controller using a newer sealed top car battery with supposedly more exotic chemistry, or a old Estes Solar controller upgraded to NiCad batteries. The third column is in white because they’re phantom products: the Fun Rockets Black Bullet on the FoldiPad with the Launch Boy controller and 9volt transistor radio battery. Fourth column: AstroCam with my 3D printed nose cone on the Estes Generic E2X, the Caliby RC boost glider on the “Gleaner” OmniPad with the Mission Controller prototype powered by LiPo battery, or the “Shoebox” controller with also LiPo power.
Today is my 65th Birthday.
Dizzy Timing, crazy redhead, from the Inventer & Igor.
Which is a sequel and spoof to this.
Flexia Bast, Revellia’s and Celandine’s Mama, from InterStellar OverDrive.
