The nose cone has taken me weeks to do, for various reasons, and it's still not done. But enough to start documenting it.

Objective: recreate, to a reasonable extent, the nose in picture 1.

Start with a 3.1" balsa ogive cone, apply CA to protect it from all the handling it's going to receive, and chop of the end so the blunt end is about 1" in diameter. See picture 2. Then sand down until it's exactly right.

The clear dome comes from a toy from a Dollar Store, after a monumental search which cost me a ridiculous amount of time (hours and hours and hours). Eventually I ended up with exactly what I wanted: a clear plastic dome, slightly less than a full hemisphere, 1" diameter at the base. See picture 3.

After all sanding to size, the fit is pretty good. See picture 4.

I drilled an oversized hole in the base for a future installation of a large eyelet that will also anchor in some washers for nose weight. I did this by putting the drill bits (successively larger size) in a vise to the desired depth, and turning the cone by hand onto the bits. Worked great. See picture 5.

Finally, thinned CWF, filler/primer, and a coat of Perfect Gray finishes up this phase. See picture 6.

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