On Jan 14, 9:31 am, "J.Kahn" wrote:
does anybody know of a relatively inexpensive and
painless way to get a stress analysis done,

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

'Stress Analysis Made Painless' by Raoul J. Hoffman.

Mr. Hoffman was an aeronautical engineer who crunched the numbers for
Matty Laird. His series of illustrated articles on stress analysis
appeared in flying magazines during the 1930's. They began with
'Properties of Airplane Materials' and included 'Elementary Graphical
Diagrams,' 'Graphical Resolution of Forces and Loads' and more than a
dozen other extremely valuable articles written for the novice
engineer.

Back when the EAA cared about more than air shows the Hoffman articles
were compiled in a single manual 'Engineering for the Amateur Aircraft
Builder' and offered to members for two dollars.

There are also a number of texts intended for the first-year
engineering student such as 'Fundamentals of Aircraft Structural
Analysis' by Frederick K. Teichmann.

During the 1930's most high schools in America offered courses dealing
with aviation. These were supported by a number of texts that usually
included stress analysis at the practical level, showing not only how
to do the various calculations but how to set-up practical experiments
for testing ribs, beams, struts and so forth.

Aviation trade-schools run by Boeing (Oakland), Northrup, Spartan and
others often published their own manuals, all of which touched upon
stress analysis although their main emphasis was on maintenance &
repair, rather than design.

This material is still out there although it's getting harder to
find. The physics & math hasn't changed -- the equations remain the
same -- and are just as applicable to today's home-builders as they
were to the yesterday's aircraft manufacturers. This subject also
provides a neat lesson in America's decline, in that you can see the
same basic-level material once offered in our public high-schools now
treated as a college-level subject for which the student is required
to pay tens of thousands of dollars.

-R.S.Hoover
-EAA 58400 (Life Member)