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Old 06-08-2010, 10:10 AM
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Cohetero-negro Cohetero-negro is offline
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Thread,

Sorry but I have been busy busy busy with rockets, wife, and life.

OK, I think someone had asked how to make your cone perfectly conical; or as near perfect as you can...

Well first the obvious: Follow the SHR instruction sheet and first trace the template out and cut it as perfect as you can. SHR's recommendation to then transfer the template to a stiff card stock is the correct way to go! I just used card board cut from FREE U.S. Postal priority mail boxes. It’s the right thickness and stiffness to be cut can then curled and act as a ‘dummy’ piece to see if the resulting cut part will be close to what I want.

Next, the trick to working with Vinyl, styrene or other plastics is heat! Now you can't place the stuff over an open flame, but you can immerse the plastic into warm to hot water. This makes it more tractable and easier to work with. The thick .030" styrene will crack and buckle (deform) too much if you don't 'loosen' it up a bit first.

So the final nose cone (without stabilizers and LES) looks like this:



Total time spent on the cone assembly so far ... ~5 hours, and I still need to sand it with 600 grit and add stabs ...

OH and by using the SHR directions for drilling holes and mounting the LES system, will only result in errors... bad bad bad ... I will be using a laser and condiment turn table to accurately position and mark holes. More on that later.

Jonathan
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