Mike,

thanks for the interesting history of the Tipo as of 1977 - most enlightening. Hopefully Dick will find a moment to reply to Andy's email (I'd already written to him in the past so was hesitant to write again with the same old questions) to enlighten us on the progress of the design from the '71-'77 period.

The one thing that caught my eye was that Dick mentioned that he and Dave had built over 150 prototypes! (Maybe they should be called "raretypes"...) I assume this meant during the period from 1971, after the world's in OH when they were first impressed with Hanno's SS and his flying skills, to Feb 1980 when the MB T720 article was published. Taking that as an 8 year period, give or take (the article was published early 1980), that means an average of more than 18 models per year. Probably some of these came straight out of the presses of WK hobbies so no actual framing up was required but still, even with their experience, it takes some time to build a glass/foam kit. Dick and Dave would have had to be building 9 models each per year... If we shorten that time period to assume that development didn't start until after 1976, well, that makes for a great deal of models being built in a 4 year time span - more than 36 a year. In short, what I'm getting at is that the conception of the Tipo must have happened well before 1975. However, when exactly plans were begun to build those prototypes remains a question for Dick to answer.

A minor comment regarding the naming of the model. In your description, you mention that the name was coined from the term Tipo (interesting that the word came off ST boxes!), which indeed does mean Type, and are the ending of Curare. That would be omitting a letter "r" from the word Tiporare. My understanding from Dick was that the name was the combination of the Italian word Tipo and the English word rare - in other words, rare-type.

David.