Last Friday's RockSim Live had a common question: "I have a 3-inch diameter paper tube that has a 2mm thick wall, and I'm looking for a nose cone for it. Can you help me find the right nose cone?" What we showed in the training episode is how to use the Apogee website to find the closest nose cones that might fit the tube. But in this case, his tube had a 2mm thick wall, which is MASSIVE compared to the 3-inch tubes that we typically use in high power rocketry. So what I suspect is that he found a thick-wall mailing tube, or some sort of spindle used in printing. Either way, we don't have a nose that would fit the tube.  But with RockSim, you can easily export out an .stl file that you can take and have 3D printed. The steps are really easy. Just make the nose cone in RockSim to fit the new tube, and then (1) click on the "export template" button at the bottom of the nose cone design screen. It will pop up a dialog window where you can save the file. When saving, just (2) select the format "STL Template (*.stl)" from the file format dropdown menu.
Once you do that, RockSim will automatically convert your nose cone to a format that any 3D printer will recognize. Then you can easily print it out and you have a custom nose cone that will fit the custom size tube. Here's a secret: it is probably cheaper than buying a pre-made nose cone. But I didn't say that... Check out the RockSim Live archive to see what topics you might be interested in learning more about - there are nearly 130 videos and counting.
What is coming up in Friday's RockSim Training session? Ask Tim your questions this week during our free RockSim LIVE training session. So have your questions ready, or submit them early to he can prepare. It is at 2pm (Mountain Time) on Friday. Just visit https://www.youtube.com/@apogeerockets/streams. You can even click the button to be reminded when it is about to start. And if you can't make it, you can always watch it on convenient replay. The topic of discussion is totally up to you. This is your chance to ask questions specific to your project.
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