We'll also need to make noses for our completely home-brew rockets.

Our first attempt was a fail. we tried putting a toothpick into an electric drill and sticking the other side into a cork, then turning the drill on and sandpaper it. When we only pressed lightly, the cork didn't grind away the way we thought it would. When we pressed harder, it still didn't do much but the toothpick broke.

So did we give up?

We did not.

Our second attempt was also a fail. We did the same-ish thing, but used a skewer instead. This time the end flopped around so much we had to hold it (loosely, 'cause splinters) and it sort of slowly ground away the cork but it kept flying off the skewer.

The skewer was too long and still too thin, and the drill didn't turn the cork fast enough to grind off much before we died of boredom. But it was better than our first attempt.

We needed a better way to hold the cork but trying to shove something thicker in the cork (like a pencil) is too hard and just splits the cork.

After this we decided to change the system again. And it worked. Here are the steps.

1. Put a cork in an anvil (not squeezing it but still firmly mounted)
2. Drill into the center of one end with a specific drill-bit (about halfway through the cork).
3. Loosen the anvil, and stick a dowel in the hole
4. Replace the drill bit with the other side of the dowel.
5. Turn on the belt sander, turn on the drill, and (lightly) shape the cork on the belt sander!

This worked!

We made three noses this way to start. One we drilled too deep and only stuck the dowel part way in. When we were shaping it we discovered the cave, so that was a fail. The other two noses were good. Looking in the rocket book we saw that ours were pretty much like two of the shapes that they said work.

We decided to test the two good ones for flight stability and crash resista4756nce. At first we tried throwing them but it was hard to always throw the same way and so our results didn't mean much. It did show that they were pretty strong though.

Then we weighed them. They both weighed 4.5g (so a little less than a nickle). That's about the weight we probably want. The plastic ones that come with the kits weight Doña

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We came up with two other ways to flight test them. The first idea was to put them in the mouth of a shampoo bottle and squeeze very hard (or stomp on it). This didn't work at first because the opening is bigger than the corks. But we got a piece of shelf liner to act as a filler and it worked great.

It was still hard to always squeeze the same though. And we thought that stomping might be better, but you are still holding up some unknown part of your weight with the leg that isn't stomping, so that was no good.

Next we tried rolling a paper tube to just fit around one of the corks and using that with the air pump. This also shot them out nicely, and we could see that they were flying pretty straight (not tumbling). Of course they were flying nose first, because they are noses. But they were flying point-first, which it the part of the nose we want flying first. It was still hard to always pulp with the same force, and it also seemed that the two weren't exactly the same size, and that made a pretty big difference because of air leaking around the sides so we gave that up.

But they can take a lot of pretty high speed crashes without denting.

Also, it doesn't hurt to be hit by one even moving pretty fast, which might turn out to be important since we don't have guidance system or collision avoidance on our list anywhere.

Now that we had a process for making them, we tried to do a production line. unfortunately, step 2 is actually pretty hard to get right, and makes a big difference to the final result, so we only got a few good ones made. We might have to make a few changes to the system. Markus Cameron Caleb