Some random thoughts just popped into my head for making a mandrel so you could roll your own elliptical tubes, should you desire to. I don't know why I'm sort of infatuated with the idea of rolling elliptical tubes, despite the fact that I've never (and probably never will) roll a tube of my own. Feel free to disregard.
Bottom line: build the mandrel yourself, using known techniques.
1) 3D-print. You'd probably have to make a small-ish piece (a few inches long) and then glue a bunch of them together. Could work.
2) Build the mandrel the same way you build your airframe, except with heavier wood (laser printed of course), and all stringers. Hardest part would be sanding the whole thing down to make the surface a really smooth curve, but quite doable.
3) I don't know the cost of CNC milling, but you could get a bunch of elliptical pieces of plywood and just stack them all together, no stringers even needed.
Probably not worth the effort to build one rocket, but if you had designs on building multiple of them in the future, it could be worth it. In any of the above approaches, you could build a short-ish mandrel (to save cost) and just join multiple segments of tubing to make longer ones. Although then you might need to roll some couplers.
Bottom line: build the mandrel yourself, using known techniques.
1) 3D-print. You'd probably have to make a small-ish piece (a few inches long) and then glue a bunch of them together. Could work.
2) Build the mandrel the same way you build your airframe, except with heavier wood (laser printed of course), and all stringers. Hardest part would be sanding the whole thing down to make the surface a really smooth curve, but quite doable.
3) I don't know the cost of CNC milling, but you could get a bunch of elliptical pieces of plywood and just stack them all together, no stringers even needed.
Probably not worth the effort to build one rocket, but if you had designs on building multiple of them in the future, it could be worth it. In any of the above approaches, you could build a short-ish mandrel (to save cost) and just join multiple segments of tubing to make longer ones. Although then you might need to roll some couplers.