[jakeru]

Now that's very counter-intuitive to me that on a perfectly symmetric looking object, that the lightening relief would be positioned off the line of symmetry. Any explanation as to why, Fred?

Also, I find it interesting that you've modeled a balancing apparatus. Wouldn't it be just as easy to assume the piece is sitting there in space and rotating by some strictly defined (assumed unmoveable) axis? I suppose with your method, you could model flexibility and oscillations of the testing jig, but I'm not sure why that would be useful, unless you were doing real-world testing on the same exact jig and wanted to somehow model very similar predicted results. At some point, the model needs to assume things are fixed. Would this simulation assume the base feet of the testing jig are fixed?

I remember getting some unversity mechanical engineering grad student to help do some FEA simulation work on designing a lightened version of wheel centers for an autocross race car I was running. This was at least 10 years ago, so the tools were a bit more rudimentary to what you seem to have access to. I don't remember using using any solvers, but rather, just manually iterated the design a few times until we were happy. The machined weight of those wheel center came out just as predicted! Very cool and memorable experience for me. So thanks for sharing your fascinating techniques.