Wood Nose Cone Construction

How to make a custom wooden nose cone for your rocket!!!

Store bought nose cones offer only a handful of shapes. a couple different gives and maybe a straight cone,  That and three fins, and your rocket is so ubiquitous that is will get unjustly fingered in a police line-up. A custom shaped nose cone can make a simple 3FNC Rocket a truly unique design. It is a lot more work than a store bought cone, but the results are satisfying!

The nose cone described in this tip was built for the Evil Grimace. The Shape of the nose cone is derived from an old BT-20 nose from the defunct MRC line. I kinda dig the pseudo military look, and I thought it has a nice symmetry with the fin strakes of the Evil Grimace . Click [HERE] for a .pdf drawing of the nosecone This nose cone is lathe turned from a lamination of clear pine boards. The are two important things you need if you are going make your nose cone this way: A lathe Someone who knows how to use it.

This is one more time that Dave's woodworking expertise has come to my rescue, When I started this project, I was unhappy about have to spend $15 on a nose cone. I would go to Dave's cubicle at work and moan about it endlessly. Dave, needing to finally get some work done, broke down and dropped $300 on a lathe so I could have my nose cone. I ponied up $3 for material and bought lunch. I figure we are even. We went into making this nose cone totally blind, only armed with Dave's formidable woodworking experience and my cheery optimism.

	One hour into the process, Dave has the blank perfectly cylindrical, and, as you can see, delirium has already set in. You start to understand why his Air Force buddies call him Mad-Dog!
	After only a few minutes of cutting, we have got the long shank of the nose cone done, now we are tackling the second angle of the cone. We are about to realize our first mistake. That we should have had the Nose Tip much closer to the center point.
	The soft pine couldn't handle the stress when we got close to the end, of the cut, and so it fractured. We had to re-center the blank to finish the shape, but it turned out perfect anyway, as you can see below. Next time we attempt this we are going to drill a center hole in the blank and fill it with a hardwood dowel. The dowel has two functions, making it easier to finish the final cut, and make the tip less prone to damage.

Here is the cone with the exterior finished.At this point I bored out the cone to reduce the weight of cone as the pine added significant weight . I centered the cone in a drill press and used progressively smaller Forstner bits to get the inside as hollow as possible. I was only able to remove about. .6 lb.. of pine, for as I got toward to tip the center of my bore began to wander and I wasn't sure I wouldn't break through to the outer surface.  To mount the recovery harness, I epoxied in a bulkhead with a 1/4 screw eye. It's burly!

Online Resources on turning wood nose cones:

This description is only enough to give you a flavor of what is required to make your own nose cones. We recommend studying the articles in the MASA Planet newsletters (Warning: These are big PDFs):

MASA Planet Article on Turning Nosecones-Part-1
MASA Planet Article on Turning Nosecones-Part-2
MASA Planet Article on Turning Nosecones-Part-3

All three of these articles are by John and Katie Hayman