Issue 11 of Westlawn's free quarterly journal, The Masthead, has just been released

The September 2009 issue of The Masthead is now posted and ready to read.

To read The Masthead, you must have a current version of ADOBE ACROBAT READER. (If The Masthead doesn’t load correctly, you probably need to download an up-to-date verion of Acrobat Reader. Go to: http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/ )

The Masthead has grown so large and contains so much information that it is now The Journal of The Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology.

ABYC Tech Notes:
In this issue of The Masthead, we are introducing a new feature which contain technical articles and notes of interest to ABYC members as well as other subscribers working in the various marine disciplines such as boatbuilding, surveying, design, and repair & maintenance. We hope that you will find this information interesting as well as useful in your professional practice.

Highlights in this edition:

• Westlawn Mystic Meet, 2009
• Owens Scholars, 2009
• Splashes
• MotorBoating Magazine Features Three Westlawn Alumni Among The Best Down East Yacht Designers
• Know It All - Questions & Answers
• Westlawn/Profiles Yacht Designer Eric Henseval
• News & Views
• Technical Article: All About Cores - Part 1
• ABYC Tech Notes: America is Getting Fatter
• Design Disaster!: A Photo Essay
• Star Spangled Regatta
• Continuing Education for Designers, Boatbuilders & Techs
• Training Links & Events
• Back Issues of The Masthead

All About Cores - Part 1
"Core materials enhance panel stiffness by dramatically boosting the moment of inertia as a result of increasing the panel thickness. In that respect, the core acts much like the web of an "I" beam, separating the load bearing flanges. If greater moment of inertia were achieved by simply increasing the amount of glass laminate, then weight would also increase proportionally. Lighter weight cores achieve this increase at substantially less weight. However, there are slight differences in the performance between the two. If the amount of glass laminate is increased, the stiffness will increase by the cube of the increase in thickness. This is the old "bh^3 over 12" argument. If core is used to increase moment of inertia with the amount of glass being constant, then the "Parallel Axis Theorem" dictates that stiffness increases by the square of the increase in thickness (remember the moment of inertia for cored laminates is dependent on the square of the distance between the centroids of the skins). Thus a cored laminate will always be thicker (and substantially lighter) than a single skin laminate of the same stiffness."

Go to:

http://www.westlawn.edu/news/WestlawnMasthead10_Sept09.pdf

to read The Masthead (allow a few moments for the file do download), and be sure to click on the "Click Here To Subscribe" at the bottom of the first page to receive the next issue automatically.

You can click on:

http://www.westlawn.edu/news/index.asp#Newsletter

To see all back issues and read whichever one you want.

Dave Gerr
Director, Westlawn Institute
www.westlawn.edu