Foundrax has a particularly significant customer base in the USA
As Brinell hardness testing is such an important part of component manufacturing for the oil and gas sectors (ensuring, in particular, that well-head equipment is fit-for-purpose), it will come as no surprise to readers that Foundrax has a significant customer base in the United States, centred around Texas.
As well as exporting a full range of Brinell hardness testers to the USA we obviously also supply Brinell and Rockwell calibration blocks / test blocks, and both manual and fully automatic Brinell microscopes. The automatic BRINtronic® microscope system, the first of its type in the World, offers split-second diameter measurement and removes operator-influence from results. It remains the industry benchmark for accuracy and repeatability.
The exporting of test equipment to the USA began in the latter 1980s and all the machines exported since then remain in service, in the rigorous conditions encountered in the US oil & gas and steel sectors. Foundrax’s expertise in Brinell testing and its 75 years of experience working with these industries has allowed the successful support of American customers from across the Atlantic and, at the time of writing, we are in discussion with a Texas oil conglomerate on the supply of another bespoke machine.
Obviously time is at a premium in the kind of high-volume, high-speed production environments encountered in the United States and the completely automatic BRINscan system – a heavy duty-Brinell test machine incorporating a BRINtronic microscope within the test head – is ideally suited to such environments, as operators do not need to remove the test material from the machine in order to measure the indentation: Indenting, surface-quality checking and measurement all take place in less than 20 seconds. Every link, in every tank track in use by the British Army is tested on such a machine. You can read more about the development of automatic indentation measurement and its global consequences for the deployment of Brinell testing here.
In addition to freestanding Brinell hardness testers we have installed several custom-designed machines in locations as varied as Chicago and Louisiana. One was an especially interesting project because it involved the installation of a Foundrax test head in a completely new type of ‘carriage’, so novel technical challenges had to be overcome to incorporate the tester into the production line.
Are you based in the USA and looking for advice on Brinell hardness testing equipment?
If you are based in the USA and need advice on acquiring the right Brinell hardness tester for your steel works, foundry, rolling mill or heat treatment plant, please feel free to call us without any obligation – we have extensive experience dealing with the hardness testing requirements of American industrial plants and you’ll be given expert advice; whether you choose to look at our product range or not!
