We have the website set up for our fundraising auction. This is our solution to get all those donated kits and other items back into circulation as well as raise money for the club. All proceeds (sale price minus credit card and website processing fees) go to the club treasury, to be used for purchasing new launch and safety equipment and maintaining our trailer and current gear.

Barring any technical difficulty, bidding on all items will open at 12:01 am on New Year's Day, and bids will remain open until noon on Sunday, January 20th. To discourage "sniping" of bids at the last minute, any bids entered in the last five minutes before the auction closes will cause the auction to remain open an additional fifteen minutes.

I'm strongly encouraging everyone to plan to pick up your items at the next club meeting, Tuesday, January 22 at Fallon's Bar & Grill in Olivette, or at a later meeting or launch. If that's not possible, you can email me to work out shipping, but I'm hoping to keep that to a minimum.

Here's the website: https://www.auctria.com/auction/slra2019

If you plan on bidding in the auction, you should be able to register now, and can register at any time while the auction is running. You do not have to register to browse through the items, which you should also be able to do now. When you register, you can optionally save your credit card number so you don't have to enter it during checkout, but you can hit "skip" if you want to wait and do it later.

A couple of things about the auction:

• Most of the kits are grouped into lots of two or three, since our auction software is limited to a total of thirty auctions.
• Several of the kits listed are out-of-production, and a few are quite rare - those are noted as (OOP) in the lot name. (Kits that are out of production by Estes but are still available through a major vendor like eRockets or JonRocket are not marked OOP.) Take a look through all the lots to see if there's something special you've been looking for.
• You will notice that many of the lots include an Astron Skydart II. We have a bunch of these left over from NARAM 58. If we can't get rid of them this way, we'll have to start hiding them in people's range boxes like the Easter bunny.

If you have any questions about the auction or any of the items, and especially if you find a problem of any sort, please email me at admin@stlouisrocketry.com. This is our first time trying this, and any snags we find now won't be problems once the auction is running.

Dan Crank
Secretary, St. Louis Rocketry Association