I'm willing to bet that there wasn't a prototype per say. The way Kania was cranking designs out for Megow, Sterling and others, I'll bet that it was designed on a Monday night, built Tuesday through Friday, test flown once on Saturday or Sunday, and if it flew at all, went into production on Monday. From what I have read and can read between the lines in some magazines, back then you needed to get it to market as fast as possible. Profit margins were very, very narrow, and the sooner you got it to market, and the more you sold, the sooner you started to make money. By the time the Ringmaster came out, Kania pretty much knew what he was doing with design at that time and could get it right the first time, so why waste time testing and refining? I think an example of what I'm talking about is the American Junior FireCat. There was a question as to whether it was OTS legal or not, because no one could find any ads for it before 1953. I need to find my copy of the Bob Smurthwaite letter that made the rounds in the last 20 years or so, and in it he explained that the model did exist before December 1952, and rather than wait for any magazine ads to hit the stands before introducing the kit, he was ordered to load up as many as they could get in his car and head to the end of the year hobby industry show and sell them. I may have something mixed up in that, but I think that was basically it. To add to that, I think some one has mentioned through the years that if you look closely, the FireCat has just about the same "numbers" as the Ringmaster and the design was ripped off from Sterling. There might be something about that in the letter also. I don't know if that file survived the move from one computer to the next here, so if someone else has a copy of it, throw it up here for us to enjoy that little piece of history.
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee