Jerobee - Vintage RC car

Here we have the first comments from Don McKay, this is all very interesting, and very impressive number of cars produced at that time.

Enjoy!

 

From my resume:

 

·         1973 – 1983 JoMac Products (formally Jerobee Ind. purchased from Rocket Research).  Half-owner and Vice President/President.  An original equipment manufacturer of electronic and mechanical Radio Controlled racing car products sold worldwide.

·         1971 – 1973 Jerobee Industries Inc., a division of Rocket Research (now Rockcor) – Redmond, WA.             Operations Manager in charge of sales, service, and production. 

 

1969 – 1971 Northwest Hobby and Toy.  Buyer and Salesman for all complex hobby items including R/C products, slot cars, model trains/boats/planes. 

 

I was also the Vice President of ROAR for all the years I was in R/C Cars and in charge of all rules, attended all ROAR Nat's, and 4 - 1/8 and 1 - 1/12 scale world championships.

 

I started racing 1/8th Scale R/C Cars in 1970 while working at NW Hobby. 

 

Some other notes I have on Cox

 

L.M. Cox wanted to buy Jerobee but held out for a lower than asking price which I felt was fair.   Also Mattel Toys was interested.   Rocket Research who owned Jerobee sold it to me and Jon Congdon for 10 Cents down for a total of about $250,000.   I was Jerobee’s Operation manager at the time.   My Partner was Jerobee’s General Manage, Jon Congdon.    It took us only two years to pay it off.

 

Cox tried to put us out of business by taking our payment but not shipping us engines.   They did not know we had 4,000 in stock.   We threaten to sue them with Anti Trust and 10 days after they got the papers, the 5000 engines, on order, arrived at my door.   We had no more trouble with deliveries after that.   We always bought engines 5,000 at a time.   

 

 Years later I was chairman of the ROAR rules committee and let an electric R/C car they imported from Japan be declared Illegal.   I did not say anything or vote against them but I would have stood up for them had not they tried to screw us.  That cost them a lot of money and they never tried to do R/C cars again.   

 

I think there was about 35,000 Cox .049 Gas Powered Jerobee Cars made and sold world wide.  Our largest foreign clients were in Brazil and France.   We also sold to Germany, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Hong Kong and some others I’m sure.

 

That included;

28,000 RTR With single port Baby Bee engine and Radios. 

2,000 with single Port Baby Bee engine less Radio.

3,000 with TD .O49 dual port with Radio.

500 with TD .049 dual port less Radio.  

The balance 1500 engines were sold as replacement engine or parts.

All the single port Baby Bee reed valve Engines used a larger Silver Bee tank but on some (about 5,000) of these engines, we modified and bypassed the internal tank an added a external 2 Ounce tank.   We kept the internal tank on only as an additional heat sink and mount.    The Baby Bee engines also can from Cox with a pull starter.   To all engines we added the fly wheels and clutch parts.

 

The Tee Dee .049 engines were stock accept for the added exhaust throttle.

We also bought a lot of bulk parts from Cox also even though they were available through the hobby channels.  I know we sold something like 80,000 reed valves in packages of 10 to maintain the reed valve engine sold and used by racers.  We sold a lot of glow plugs, piston and sleeves (ground for the throttle ring).

 

We also sold about 50,000 (25,000 each) electric Jerobee and Lightening 2000 cars.