I don't recall ST being the first with the tuned muffler. If they had, I'm sure I would have a couple boxes of them in the basement. The Magic Muffler was developed in Australia by Ian McCaughey, imported by Condor Hobbies a very long time ago (mid-80's). The first engine that came with an attempt of a one piece design (one piece until you ran it a while) was Rossi, but when Nelson put it on his early Quickie motors in the early 90's it was pretty well developed. To the best of my knowledge, the magic muffler was never patented, so it was considered "public domain" for future designs. Dub Jett developed a spiral can version that is slightly down in power from the longer pipe versions. I had suggested folding a magic muffler to Dubby in an email back in 2000, but his implementation was very clever (I had no practical idea how to build it) and he received a patent on the design around 2004.

Viewing the presentation videos of the Orange and Black teams was very enlightening. A fair bit of analytical analysis by the students for their preliminary designs, CAD design, CNC machining of molds, learning to do composite layups, and assembly of rather impressive models show a lot of dedication by all involved. The tools available to the students now make me jealous, thinking back to punch cards to run simple programs on the old IBM 360 we had back in the 70's that filled a room. It took me a week to plot an elliptical wing and 10 or 12 ribs with a CalComp plotter using a program I wrote 40 years ago. I think the turn time was about 12 hours, so mistakes were costly to the schedule.

Even the HS groups are doing very good builds, and this might boost engineering enrollments further down the road. I noticed Dr. Larry Kruse in one, who grew up about 11 miles down the road from me. I think Larry has retired from running a university, but has not lost the love of teaching. I have done programs with HS students a few times with groups from companies that I worked for in the past. It's tough to herd cats but not too different than working with HS students on a project. One group was a business group - fairly easy because the concept of making money is near and dear to teens, but the other was to build robots that could perform certain tasks. Very tough, because the idea of limited time and money didn't seem to register (same as congress).

Anyway, if there is a point here, try to get some kind of program going with the youth in your area. Most modelers are getting old, and the problem solving involved with actually building a model airplane provides hands on experience that seems to be sorely lacking today.