Yeah, I can see them selling all their reject or unapproved for sale stuff that they never decided to proceed with. Better to sell it and make a little money off of it than to send it to the scrap yard for the aluminum. Maybe these "not sold as a retail item" chassis are all samples provided to them by their anodize finish house so that they could look at different colors for consideration into possibly making something for future sale, that just never panned out.
It could be that, but they were not actually sold as a normal retail item by Associated (ie. no part number and no known inventory), just sold to get rid of shelved stored stuff they never had any intention of producing and therefore would not be any different than what others have done in anodizing their own colors.
Still it would be cool to know if in fact they did come from Associated. We'll see what Curtis has to say. I emailed him this morning with pictures.
When I worked for Composite Craft, we had tons and tons of graphite items for RC cars developed, made and tested, that did not make it to a final product stage. Not even prototype, just items made that never cut it to be produced for sale. Most all of these things we just threw out. The one I remember the most was a custom made land-sailing car. It had 4 wheels/tires, and a composite frame with a sail and mast and worked entirely off of the wind. It was cool to get it up on two wheels in the large test area we ran them. We made two of them and the owner and I would run them from time to time. It was about 3.5-4 feet wide, 3 feet long and when on the asphalt, the main sale and mast were approx. 38 to 40 " high.
