10 replies to this topic

[Mike Patterson]

Does any one remember who was the first company to market the Jet Flag? And does any one know who actually made them?

[mjsh]

Simco?

[Cheater]

Not to hijack your thread, Mike, but I think the story of the Starburst flag might be more interesting, at least the vague version of it I heard.

[Foamy]

Simco had the same owners as Associated.

The Starburst flag came about because the Jet Flags were getting bad from worn-out tooling. The second owner of Outisight and a local racer/mold maker made them.

[Cheater]

The story I heard about the Starburst guide was that some hippie kind of guy had a six-up mold made and then traveled the country from raceway to raceway selling them. It that total BS?

[Jairus]

BS? Boiled sausage?

I like sausage.

[Steve Deiters]

As I recall it went from Simco to Associated fairly quickly. It was quite a jump in performance going from the Cox guide which was beginning to become rare to the Associated.

 

Since they were white they were sold to the others on OEM basis and they were dyed with Rit dye. Parma had them as green. REHCo had them as orange. There were others...

 

Later came the "Steube" guide which had a tapered leading edge and layered sections on the side. It was more per unit and never really got any traction in sales.

[TSR]

The boss asked me to put in my 2 cents.
So here are some extracted lines from the never ending book:
 

 

In 1968, SimCo produced the first modern guide flag that was quickly adopted by the whole pro-racing establishment. Shortly after, SimCo went on hard financial times and sold its assets to Associated Electrics.

Then, there is this:
 

 

...So successful was the venture that it turned into a full-time business which they named Associated Electrics after they absorbed the assets of the SimCo business that included the molds for the “Jet Flag”, the best pickup guide design available at the time and that survives today in slightly modified form.

There you have it. The mold had 12 cavities and the flags are marked to show which is which.

[Jairus]

Ammm well, why are there no more than 1 - 4 on the guides?

Ron Hershman joked that #5 was the straightest and yet... only 1 - 4 exist?

[Mike Patterson]

Thanks for the info, Philippe. I was just thinking about these the other night, and how they were pretty much a constant from the 60s to the 90s.

 

I always wondered what the numbers stood for. I just checked my small stash, and I have 2s, 3s and 4s.

[TSR]

I was told by Roger Curtis, who was one of Asociated's two partners (the other was Lee Yurada) that the mold had 12 cavities. However for technical reasons (to be able to have the mold shot on a small automatic "Arbor" machine with limited molding pressure capability), several cavities were blocked, explaining why the higher numbers are scarce, since only SimCo shot them and for a very short time before selling out.