A guide to buying a Brinell hardness tester

Are you considering the purchase of a Brinell hardness tester?

Why choose Foundrax? There are other hardness tester suppliers, after all…

Well, it’s all about expertise and pedigree. A mechanical engineer, metrologist, metallurgist and design engineer could, between them, produce a machine that performed Brinell hardness tests. Would that machine, however, be able to perform millions – literally – millions of test cycles in a steelworks? Would it give reliable, repeatable results, year after year with just an annual service and calibration?

Foundrax’s hardness testing machines

Foundrax machines are built to do just that. The company has been supplying them for over 65 years, drawing on an industrial (foundry) heritage that can be traced back to the 19^th Century. Every machine we supply has been designed with the rigours of steelworks conditions in mind. One of our machines performed 30 million test cycles in such an environment before being replaced (as a precaution – it was still working!). That same machine survived being shunted three metres into a brick wall by a fork lift truck and when it was tested on the repair bench it was still in calibration! There’s some old video footage of this legendary machine below.

The Brinell test is ideal for steelworks testing because cast parts can be prepared for the test with nothing more complicated than a light surface grinding. The same cannot be said of the Vickers and Rockwell tests, which require far more time-consuming surface preparation and very clean test conditions which are not, of course, found on a factory floor. For this reason, Brinell hardness testing will remain the default method in steelworks and foundries and this, in turn, requires Brinell test machines to be ruggedly constructed if they are to continue performing year after year.

Foundrax’s hardness testing machines are supremely tough. Every component has been designed to give trouble-free operation over many years. Not only that, but they offer integral automatic indentation measurement as an option, giving dramatic savings in time and labour costs over their lifetime of service. They offer tremendous value for money.

The photo shows our field-proven test head fitted on our new 400 series machine (photographed during its 300,000-cycle bench trial), where the rugged construction is clearly evident.

You can read more about how Foundrax pioneered automatic indentation measurement below.

The introduction of automatic indentation measurement: the Foundrax development that revolutionised Brinell hardness testing

Foundrax MD Alex Austin on the ‘slow revolution’ in Brinell testing that the company pioneered Foundrax has been in the hardness testing business for over

24/08/2020

Alex Austin

Alex is a member of the ISE/101/05 Indentation Hardness Testing Committee at the British Standards Institution. He has been part of the delegation to the International Standards Organisation advising on the development of the standard ISO 6506 Metallic materials - Brinell hardness test and is the chairman and convenor for the current ISO revision of the standard.

Alex’s industrial pedigree can be traced back to 18th Century Bohemia, where his forebears ran a foundry supplies business and in his work at the British Standards Institution he has used his extensive knowledge of Brinell testing in the UK’s steel, oil and gas industries to ensure that the interests of the end user are appropriately represented.
Alex has been Managing Director of Foundrax Engineering Products since 2001. A skilled negotiator and commercial manager, Alex leads a team of engineers and technicians with skills ranging all the way from traditional toolmaking to embedded software systems, and he is currently engaged in bringing the next generation of Brinell hardness testers into production (the first of these was launched in 2021). He recently expanded the production team and purchased a new factory space to cope with increasing orders, particularly for Foundrax’s custom-designed, custom-built, bridge-type hardness testing machines.