Hardness tester

Hardness tester

Keywords: Mitutoyo, Portsmouth Aviation, Hardness testing

As suppliers to the Ministry of Defence and aerospace manufacturers,Portsmouth Aviation cannot afford to take any chances when carrying out materials testing. Considering the nature of the company's business, it can easily be seen why quality assurance is paramount: Portsmouth Aviation's products include handling equipment for bombs, missiles and torpedoes, including weapon release gear for helicopters. A vital part of the quality control for critical items is material hardness testing. To enable testing to be carried out quickly and easily on a wide variety of materials, Portsmouth Aviation has purchased a Mitutoyo WizHard Hardness Tester (Plate 2).

The WizHard is claimed to be the world's first hardness tester to enable testing on Rockwell B & C, Vickers, Shore and Brinell scales, all using the one unit, with the capability of generating test forces of up to 187.5kgf. Furthermore, a much higher level of accuracy than with traditional hardness testers is believed possible, due to the WizHard operating via load cell technology, as opposed to the traditional method of using dead-weights.

  Plate 2 Portsmouth Aviation uses a Mitutoyo WizHard hardness tester

Having ISO 9001 and TS157 accreditation and Westland Helicopters' approval,Portsmouth Aviation also carries out subcontract hardness testing for other Westland-approved companies, with reports for customers being printed directly from the WizHard machine. Ian Armstrong, calibration engineer at Portsmouth Aviation, said: "Previously, we had an old Rockwell testing machine that we loaded up with weights and it took a long time to get a result. The WizHard is so much quicker and easier to use and it is very useful to be able to give the customer a printout of the results. We can also test in any scale the customer needs."

As well as being able to test the hardness of flat components, the WizHard can also check the inside and outside of convex and concave surfaces. Four operators, including class 1 and class 2 approved NDT operators, use the WizHard at present. More will be trained in the future to meet the growing demand from customers for testing, as explained by Ian: "Since we have had the machine,we have taken on more testing in the last three months than we had in the last three years! Because the machine is so simple to use, I can easily train more operators to use it."

The decision to purchase the Mitutoyo equipment was made only after alternative equipment had also been considered but, according to Ian, the latter did not look such good value for money. In addition, Mitutoyo was also prepared to offer a good part-exchange deal on Portsmouth Aviation's old machine.

Details available from: Mitutoyo (UK) Ltd. Tel: +44 (0)1264 353123; Fax: +44(0)1264 345883; E-mail: janice.cook@mitutoyo.co.uk