Thanks John!
Will do!
I made a plug for a mold today out of expanding foam using a payload bay template, some paper CR's punched with holes made in OR, a BT-5 stripped body tube, nose block and nose cone, teflon tape, and a BT-55 conical to hold it while I foamed it.
It's too bad I had the gloves, respirator and goggles on for the outdoor process, as I did not get pic's of it, but it seems to have worked out very nicely for a first go, and if the plug turns out well, I'll end up with a mold for BT-60 conicals.
The tip was frustrating me about getting perfect, so I decided to see if the process I envisioned was even valid by simply deciding to chop it off and go through with it for proof of concept.
If I decide that it should be a flying nose cone rather than a plug to make molded parts, I can remove the wooden dowel if need be by cutting the exposed portion of BT-5 hanging out of the shoulder, as I was careflu to only have the dowel held in with a little of the foam.
That way if the cone is for flying, I can take advantage of the hollow body tube core up to the point of the upper most CR that is sized around a BT-5 nose block from BMS, or even if I had to, drill through that balsa to the upper hollow under the BT-5 cone.
I just used a few tows of CF that were roughed up and CA'd to the Balsa at the tip to give me a rigid surface to press into a bearing if I need to chuck in in the drill to rough sand it, as my lathe is still "Almost Ready". If it was finished, I would not have tried this experiment, and I'm glad I did, as I learned a lot, and this is a very light cone even with the dowel still in it.
I used Crown 3470 spray mold release inside the BT-55 plastic cone to make sure I could get the two apart, and it worked well.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it fit a BT-60 after just some quick clean up with sandpaper and then some very gentle touches of an acetone soaked Q-tip. Some factory plastic/balsa or glass cones don't even fit this nice, but that's understandable as they have to make thousands of them, so they cannot pay attention to detail for each one.