I read elsewhere that Tower was selling them for about $50 in the late 80's or early '90's. Makes sense, at that time MDS had no real distribution in NA - we had imported a few .40's and .61's late '80's and peddled them locally and I have a couple of those left and one FIRE 10cc. Estes looked at them at the time (and at Mutunuc which went nowhere, I have a .61 of those too I got for review and test - another decent OS clone is all), then they were picked up "for real" by.. Tower I guess or did someone else get in there first. forget. That was when they started getting general exposure in the US. And when people found out they ran strong but the carbs were leaky and they didn't tolerate much over 5% nitromethane, as opposed to being fine up to 15% or so as most folks were used to. So some folks had issues.

The machine screws in this are really just the metric equiv of UNF versus UNC. So one step off the normal beaten track I guess, enough that I can;t pick up a pack of spares from the Dubro/Sullivan or car department at the LHS. I'll order some.