I finally worked out my frustum problem, but ideally, the steps in this explanation could be made into a function. Not that anyone would need to do it very often (hah, who am I kidding? I’ve done it more times than I can count, and actually cut materials 3 times so far).
So you want to make a tapered cone section, but you don’t know the first thing about how to make the flat pattern?
But are there any programmable calculators online that can handle this? I was hoping the graphing calculator here in OS X would do, but it’s not a calculator so much as a viewer.
It would be interesting to simply drop the known values into the equation(s) and get back the result.