JOE OTT MODEL AIRPLANE KITS 1920 - 1950

JOE OTT MANUFACTURING
The model airplane designer and kit manufacturer, Joseph S. Ott (Joe Ott) was born in 1900 and died at the age of 86. His birthdate is sort of important as you'll learn in the next paragraph.
Ott was a designer and builder of model airplanes. Early designs depended upon spruce and bamboo for construction which consisted of a lot of twin-boom pushers and sticks. The explosion of model kits didn't happen until balsa wood began to be used in the late 1920s. Ott's major contributions to modeling began in the 1930s. He authored the book, MODEL AIRPLANES - Building and Flying, published in 1931 in Chicago. The Preface to this book states that, "The author, who has been engaged in aviation work and model design and construction for the past twenty years, has designed, built and flown hundreds of models of every known type. From this vast experience he has selected certain models, which have been outstanding successes as flyers, and only these have been included in this book." This suggests to us Joe was designing planes at the age of eleven. He designed the "American Rocket Model" in 1930 which used a standard fireworks-style rocket motor. One model from this book, the Sky Pursuit, was featured in a building article in Model Aviation in November 1984 -members of the AMA can access this article from the AMA's website archives.
Ott began designing scale, rubber powered flying models. His scale designs were meant for flying, not static scale. These were somewhat "standoff scale" when gepared to the detailed models of Ed Packard's Cleveland, Wanner and Peerless kits. Joe Ott designed models for Popular Aviation as model editor in the early 1930s, bookended by Bertram Pond and Paul Lindberg. One of Fred Megow's earliest kits, the nice "Gee-Bee Super-Sportster" R-1 of 1933, was based on a 1932 Joe Ott design although not given credit on the plan.
Joe Ott produced SKYFLYER kits in the mid-1930s with a gepany name of Model Aircraft Products in Chicago. An example of this series is the "Wedell Williams" solid model kit with a wingspan of 6-inches. This solid kit features printed balsa blocks with a nice plan of the Wedell Williams #92, NR536V, although it is not identified as such on the plan. The plan states, "ALL SKY FLYER PLANS COPYWRIGHT by J.S. OTT MODEL DESIGNER AND AUTHOR". The bottom area of the black