Plywood Bulkheads vs. Composite plywood vs. composite glass

[CatBuilder]

Originally Posted by rxcomposite

Its Ok cat. You are trying to learn all at once. Me, I try to make things simple. These are the things I do everyday so I hate repeating it. My excel is now so complex and large to the extent that while I am designing the boat, the other spreadsheets is computing the BOM and material cost, labor cost, weights, ect.

Nice! I usually work like that as well... linking all the Excel sheets together so when you change one thing here, the rest changes automatically. I used to use Excel (and IDL) a lot to analyze data from a couple of spacecraft I worked on while at NASA. That got me in the habit. Repeating things is very inefficient, I definitely know what you're talking about. Thanks for all the help so far. I've learned a lot... nearly ready to start in.

[rxcomposite]

You worked in NASA? You have heard of Martin Holmann? He was into composites 1983 and I learned my basics from his books. He was also a partner in our company.

[CatBuilder]

No, I haven't heard of him. There are many *many* different places where you can work for NASA. My work was done in conjunction with a university in the northeast and at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD (with a few trips to locations in Europe to work with ESA on a joint project). Those were the locations I worked at. We had a few materials engineers on our team, but they worked mostly in aluminum frames that supported the instruments we flew on the missions. Mechanical engineers, mostly. I was a physicist, so I worked on 3-d modeling of the plasma we were detecting with our sensors, calibrating the sensors and writing programs to interpret data streams. There weren't many "materials guys" in my group.

[rxcomposite]

Great work.

Well, it was a long shot anyway. Just thinking if you have crossed paths.