I was looking at Norton's Machine Design textbook, and the Stress Analysis of a bike lever and cable was real complicated. The other examples were complicated too. Have you ever done such complicated Stress Hand Calculation Analysis at work? I would just be tempted to model it in Solidworks or Proe, and then use the CAD FEA to do the Stress and deflection analysis for me. But it seems I'm very rusty right now in doing hand calculations. I don't recall doing such complex stress calculations during my college courses.
If your job requires complex stress calculations, do you sometimes get help from a Sr Eng to do these calculations? Or do they have a specialized Stress Analysis Engineer for doing stress analysis? Or do you just rely on Solidworks FEA to do your Stress Analysis?
Hand calc's are best in my opinion. SW is a round about the right answer or close enough to some companies. You should always back it up with your own calculations. I would ask senior engineer for help if your in doubt of anything.