FSI motor thread
 

In the early to late 70s (1983 at the very latest; that's when the motors were listed as "discontinued" in the price sheet). FSI packed its 21mm x 70mm motors (A4 through D6) in little red boxes.

I didn't get a lot of motors in these sizes. Maybe half a dozen boxes. Two survived the decades. Both are intact but in shabby shape. One lived in my range box for more than two decades, acting as an igniter storage box.

I scanned the flattened out boxes this afternoon, and just now took pictures:








The A4-2 box was marked ".90" in pen, the C4-4 ".95". I think. The ink is very faded.

I don't remember if FSI ever packed 21mm x 70mm motors in plastic bags (as were all the other motors), or if that size was simply dropped.

These photos have my eyes popping out of my head. :D So these are, what, mid- to late-70s vintage? Do you still have any of the motors, and especially, the igniters? (I have seen precious little of the former, and no photos at all of the latter.)

I have no 21mm x 70mm motors left. I used the last ones in the late '80s.

OK. I broke out the camera again.

Late-80s, maybe early 90s B6-5 motors:

I maybe bought three or four FSI 18mm motor packs . . . just wasn't worth specially getting them when there were MRC and Estes motors a plenty around. When I bought FSI it was the big stuff.

Same-era E6-5:

I bought and used plenty of those! I pretty much wore out my poor old Viking II.

Ditto, E60-6:

I burned a fair number of these through the years, but not compared to my F100 count!

This is what an FSI igniter looked like. It might not be an actual FSI igniter, but a substitute sold by North Coast Rocketry. They were essentially a 1" to 4" long piece of thermalite wick. A brittle stick of flammable stuff wrapped in wires and then wrapped in floss-like protective fabric.



I have some "naked" 21mm x 95mm D18 motors and some F100 and F7 motors which I will photograph another day.

Black powder E60s............

Wowwww! :)

The Bs and Es do look very much like Estes motors. It appears that for a time nearly everyone and his brother were making, or at least selling under their own label, essentially the same or very similar motors. At the time the market must have been big enough to justify that, I guess. Many companies also did seem to offer some that were uniquely their own, too.

Cool. I have one of these boxes, with motors still in it, in my collection. It's buried so I don't recall the size motors in there.

I've got a red box. I think there are A4 motors in it. All the other FSI motors I have are loose or bagged.

I have a '77 FSI catalog (which is up on Ninfinger) and used to drool over those big motors, but never bought any before I got out of the hobby when I started college. I now have a crapload of FSI bagged motors that I got off of eBay about 12yrs ago before they cracked down on selling motors, from the old ROL auctions and from Kevin when he owned Countdown Hobbies. I also now have most of the kits. I've yet to build or launch any of them on some of those old motors though. :rolleyes:

If I'm not mistaken, the E60's were F-100's in an earlier incarnation. FSI finally got around to properly labeling their motors very late in the game. The A's were B's, the Bs,'C's the C's, D's etc....they drove the NAR S&T crazy.


Terry Dean

Great pics by the way.....

Terry,

I think it's both. That is, early on, there was indeed an E60 alongside the F100. (Reference the 77 catalog.) It does not appear in later catalogs. But, as I recall, the F100 was ultimately redesignated. Not sure if it became a latter day E60, or if they called it something else, but that gibes with your story.

FWIW, I have an E60-0 at the house I've been hoping to getting around to flying one of these days, but I'm not sure when it was made - that is, if it's the earlier E60, or the redesignated F100. It's about 4 inches long, maybe a little longer, and a few tape wraps shy of fitting a 29mm tube.

<research timeout...Jeopardy music playing in the background>

In the 77 catalog, the F100 is described as being 27 x 150mm, so I'm thinking mine is the earlier E60, which, given what we know of FSI motors, is probably more like a D40 :)

Doug

.

The E60's were labeled correctly.
FSI E60s were and are still the most cato prone motors I ever had the DIS-pleasure of owning/flying; well OVER a 50% cato rate no matter if the igniter was placed top, bottom, or middle of core. They made a lot better M-80s than rocket motors.

The F100's were actually like F70's.
Most D, E, and F FSI motors BARELY tested into the impulse they were labeled and sometimes not even.
The F100's and F7's usually tested between 38 and 45 n-sec, even though they were listed as 50 and 55n-sec respectively.
The E60's were usually somewhere around 35n-sec
The awful E6x motors were sometimes below 20 nsec and barely equal in total impulse to the Estes D12. Think of the E6 as a REALLY WEAK version of the weak-thrusting Estes E9.