totally agree Powder:
I've been throwing around motors for a long time trying to make them CATO. With only marginal success. Back in the very early 80's several of the guy's in my flying group. purchased motors, direct, from local hobby shops and from garage sales. many different types but we were mostly looking for the suspect core burning motors B8's, B14's and C5's as well as any D12 or OLD D13's we came across.
the packaged motors were then, not handled properly, droppped from table height onto cement floors, set in the sun, in storage sheds for weeks, clay nozzles scrapped with nails, knifes and other scappings. just generally treated pretty badly.
of somewhere around 60 motors I think we succeeded in helping a couple B8's blow thur. Only had one D13 Case split that i'm not sure we had a thing to do with.
As I mentioned earlier I'm pretty anal about not leaving my motor boxes in the van in or other super hot places and try to keep them in ambiant temp on humidity conditions always. My Cato rate personally is Rare to almost non-existant.
During the OOP testing I've been conduction for the NAR over the last 6 months We've launched over 150 motors with date of manufactures back to 1966. to date I've had 3 cato's two of them last weekend. One an A10-Ot I purchased last summer with a 6A6 date code (1996) and a C5-3 from the bad batch Estes listed and pulled for the shelved, 9x6 I believe, but that one I have to look up as it was given to me on the field, with the info that it was one from that known BAD batch
The third was a 1971 Centuri 13mm motor.
I'm pretty well convinced there is very little we as consumers can do that harms our BP motors. store and use them with a little common sense and the are pretty much good indeffinately
I sure Hope the NAR will agree with these findings and stop decertifing BP motors for sport flying use simply because of production status, I think we've pretty well shown they are right stable over very long periods of time.