Old Engine Dating

Engine photo below is from vintageestesrockets.com

From the Tripoli FAQ page:

On older Estes & Centuri motors, the date of manufacture is indicated by a number indicating the day, a letter code indicating the year, and another number indicating the month. The letter codes correspond to the years shown in the table below. From 2000 onwards, the practice of using a letter code to represent the year was abandoned.

E 1974      M 1982      U 1990       C 1998
F 1975       N 1983      V 1991       D 1999
G 1976      O 1984      W 1992
H 1977      P 1985       X 1993
I 1978       Q 1986       Y 1994
J 1979       R 1987      Z 1995
K 1980      S 1988       A 1996
L 1981       T 1989       B 1997

Trogdor:

Hi Earl,

Thanks for thinking of me. Hopefully Vern's memory will be better than mine on this, but here goes:
I can't remember what the first two letters were other than a production date code of some sort. The last letter in the series was an identity code for the operator who made that motor. My operator code was "V" and Keith Kohler's was "X". I can only remember Keith's as he always liked to claim that "brand X" was better than the competing "brands". And of course I remember my own code. As operators we were very conscious of quality and always checked the returns for the operator code. I'm sure that each of us thought we were the best, but I tracked returns for quite awhile and really couldn't prove that my motors were any better than anyone else's. Not that that changed my mind.
As far as the current date codes, we started in 1976 with "F" as that would be the letter if we started with 1971 being "A".
The above is as accurate as I can remember.

Best wishes,
Ed
==============================

Thought this was interesting info and thanks to Ed for such a fast response. Now, if we can just find out what the first two letters corresponded to date-wise.

Earl
Earl L. Cagle, Jr.