In this day and age approaching the owner is probably a bad idea. Egos are bruised way to easily. You have your escape plan in your head already. Just polish it up, then go quietly. Good Luck.
OK. First. Von-Mises stress is not a stress, it is a scalar value of a failure theory. Second, with metals you do not address bypass stresses. Third, If you are doing an ultimate analysis you cannot use the model fastener loads, if you hare doing a linear distribution, unless you are correctly...
That's a poor way to splice a longeron. The splices cannot transfer shear loads between each other. I definitely would never do that, and never have. Use angles or something other than just plates.
To have a better understanding of bearing bypass curves realize that it is just an interaction curve. A good analogy is the Von Mises Criterion Failure curve.
