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Old 10-28-2011, 09:54 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gpoehlein
Gonna be some fairly small nose cones, though. The sales brochure says the unit is limited to 3.39" x 2.17" x 1.02". I'm thinking NC-50 or so is gonna be your biggest nose cone, and those will be limited to a bit less than 3-1/2" long. But those are also gonna be some heavy nose cones if you make them from plastic. Of course, it does say it will work in balsa, so you might be able to do some interesting stuff that way, but I'm thinking you'd pretty much need to do most nose cones as halves and glue them together. I can see this being really useful to someone who plans to use it to make intricate nose come shapes as a master, then making a slush cast mold from it. (it might even be possible to use it in reverse and clut your mold with it, but you'd have to find the right material to work with).
Two thoughts:

[1] Cast polyurethane resin with hollow microballoons (microbulb filler) is light enough to float on water, so the nose cones--even if solid--need not be heavy. (If someone needed extra-heavy nose cones for ballast/balance purposes, the resin "blanks" could be filled with ceramic microspheres or metal powder to make them denser and heavier.) The nose cones (and boat-tails, body tube adapters, and even scale fins) could be machined out of "blanks" made of microballoon-filled resin (for lighter parts).

[2] Maybe those of us who want custom nose cones from Semroc could chip in as a group (along with Carl & Co., if they're interested) to buy one of these machines for/with Semroc? It wouldn't take long for us to order all of the custom parts (not just nose cones) that would make it worth our while (perhaps they could "pay" us in a certain number of free machine-made nose cones [and/or other parts] per subscriber).
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