Need someone with engineering background to assist with statics calculation

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dmehling
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I am looking for someone with mechanical engineering background who can assist me in making some calculations. I have an aluminum tray that is connected to a tripod and that supports a laptop. I want to get a lighter and smaller aluminum tray that can accommodate a tablet, but I don't know exactly how small and thin I could get it. I have spent countless hours attempting to find the answer and I asked a version of my question in both the physics and engineering sections of this forum but no luck. I tried to use a free fea cad program but it was a bit too complicated for me. I'm sure that an engineering student could easily figure this out and I would be willing to hire one for a reasonable rate. Better yet would be someone willing to volunteer a little bit of their time. I don't know how complicated this is, but I'm guessing that it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to make some approximate calculations.
 
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Yes, that's basically it. If you do a Google image search for aluminum laptop tripod you will see many examples of what I'm trying to do. Right now I have an aluminum tray for my old laptop that sits on a tripod mount. I want the same thing for my tablet, but I want to reduce the weight of the tray as much as possible. The current aluminum tray is about 1/8" in thickness and easily supports my nearly 5 pound laptop, and I imagine it could probably support double that weight. Based on that, I would like to see if a 1/16" tray could work. Furthermore, I would like to know if I could make other changes in regard to the shape of the tray and any other weight reducing techniques.
 
If you want to test different shapes of the tray, you need to do a finite element elastoplasticity simulation on a computer, and input the shear modulus and yield stress of aluminum as parameters.
 
I really need someone who can do that for me, since I definitely don't have any experience with engineering. I played around with a free program called Lisa for the last hour, and I really have no idea what I'm doing.
 
Some things are best determined empirically.
Stiffness without thickness .let's think here ...
Cardboard is corrugated for a reason. Cooking trays have a lip for a reason. Eggshells are curved for a reason.
Can you put some curvature in your design ? or roll an edge ?
I'd go to local hardware store and buy some aluminum sheet for experimentation. Or a metal salvage yard - mine gets a lot of interesting aircraft structural parts...

old jim