Progress was made! Starting off, a week or two ago, I got the coupler and motor mount stock from my buddy with all the good power tools. I had previously glued up a block of wood from spare strips that weren't needed for the body tube. He took that down to an octagonal shape for the motor mount and nose cone coupler. He also clipped the corners of the coupler down a little bit so that it starts fitting into the nose cone and drilled out the hole for the motor mount. I took the nose cone coupler a little further with my trusty low angle block plane so that the coupler gets a little more glue area on the nose cone. After that, it was a matter of choosing the "right" orientation so that the nose cone has the best possible alignment with the body tube. Then we made sure everything fit nicely and potted it all up with some T-88. The last picture is what it looks like all assembled. I need to clean up some glue on the inside of the body tube so that the nose cone fits all the way on.
Then it was on to the motor mount. We still had a little fitup to do with the plane, plus I made a slot for the shock cord. I wrapped a piece of 29mm LOC motor mount in parchment paper and stuck it in the mount so that I knew it would all fit well. The shock cord was tacked down with 5-minute epoxy, then the bottles of T-88 came out again to glue the whole shooting match into place.
Here we are with an all-up-ish weight. I haven't cut out fins yet, so there's some weight savings there, but I also haven't glued fins in or done the internal fillets (see below). Nor do I have the JLCR that I'll use in place yet. On the whole, I expect to get a little lighter before being done. I'm in good shape to be under 1500g at the pad, since I only need to reserve about 150-200g for motors.
Finally, when I glued up the staves into a body tube, I didn't get 100% glue coverage on the inside. On some of the joints, I didn't get 10% squeeze out. I want to make sure this is plenty strong and that the stave corners don't snag the chute, so I poured internal fillets along each of the stave joints. This was pretty straightforward--mix up a small batch of laminating epoxy (I use System 3 Silvertip, fantastic stuff), tip the tube up about 45 degrees, and slowly pour the epoxy in and wait for it to flow all the way down to the motor mount. Then prop up so that corner is down and let it set up. I put in about 2 tsp per fillet and could do one about every 2 hours. This is what it looks like now. The very top of the tube is cleaned up for the nose cone coupler and had good glue coverage. I'll need to take the fillets back a little to get the nose to fit again.