Brief

This is a story of reclamation.  At some point in the past decade I became enamored with the Estes National Aerospace Plane and decided that I needed to clone one.  To that end I began scouring Ebay for one of the kits that shared the unique nose cone with the NASP, namely the Estes Sentinel, Magnum, Firehawk, and the Raven.  I won a Firehawk kit, but liked it so much that I went ahead and built it.  Then I won the Raven, a more traditional 4fnc bird that I figured would not tempt me the way the more exotic Firehawk had.  The Ebay ad stated that it was "started, but complete and in good condition", which turned out to be almost complete bull.  When it finally arrived it was indeed complete, but in nothing approaching good condition.  It was actually two kits, one an unidentified BT-55 kit that had had the fins badly attached, the other the BT-60 Raven.  The BT-55 rocket had been shoved into the BT-60 tube hard enough that the fins cut into the cardboard of the BT-60 tube.  Both appeared to have been stepped on, as was the nose cone.  At first the whole thing looked to be a total loss, but I was able to rebuild the nose cone with clever application of CA and a lot of luck.  Since the cone was the thing about the kit that I was most interested in, and since the price had been dirt cheap + postage, I bit back on my ire and started the NASP build with the rebuilt cone.  Everything else went into the trash except for the engine hook, fin stock, instructions, and decal.  I filed everything away for future reference and forgot about it until the future came calling in 2015 when I ran across them while cleaning my shop.  Part of the clean-up plan was to tie up any unfinished projects, which the Raven qualified as once I replaced the body tube and engine mount.  I just happened to have the parts laying around.