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Turning cap-sized nose cones

With a lathe it is easy to make your own nose cones. Even without a lathe, you can make your own: Find a way to glue a screw into a cut off bottle neck - the screw must sit as good as possible on-axis. The screw needs to stick out of the non-cap side - the cap side needs to be unobstructed for a cap to be screwed on. Then put this screw into your drilling machine and proceed as shown below.

Cutting the styrodur

As material, I used a special sort of styropor called Styrodur. It is widely used in Germany to insulate houses. It is considerably harder than styropor. It can be cut easily with a knife.

Lacking styrodur, any hard kind of styropor, which is usually white and often used for packaging, can be used as well.

cutting the raw form

Next, the raw form is cut.

Glueing with UHU por.

Styrodur and Styropor can only be glued with special glues. I use UHU por, which smells like the rubber vulcanizing fluid used to repair bike tubes.

The bottle cap is sanded, both surfaces are covered with a thin layer of glue. Wait a few minutes until dry, then press both parts forcefully.

Turning: start with coarse sanding paper

A cut-off bottle neck is tightened in the three-jaw-chuck, the cap is screwed upon. Turning the styrodur with the cutting knife from above did not work well. Much better is coarse sanding paper - the Styrodur appears as soft as butter.

animated gif: the turning process

This animated gif shows the turning process. Fine sanding paper is used in the final step - this gives a nice smooth surface.

The first set of nose cones

The first set of nose cones for bottle caps.

 You want to know how this nosecones perform? Click here!

 

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Stand / Last Revision:  19.10.02

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