Equipment 'to boost accuracy' (From Keighley News)

Equipment 'to boost accuracy'

3:22pm Thursday 10th May 2012 in News By David Knights

Keighley Laboratories has invested in a cutting-edge testing machine to improve its service to customers.

The Zwick Roell ZHV-10 automatic micro and macro hardness tester will also have benefits for staff.

The company, which is based in South Street, said the equipment would improve accuracy and productivity.

The new equipment was supplied by Indentec of Stourbridge, a worldwide centre of excellence for hardness testing machines, which has had a business relationship with Keighley Labs for many years. Keighley Labs believes the new kit will allow it to make considerable time savings over previously manual routines, and free highly-skilled operators for other analytical duties.

Keighley Labs’ Test House manager Matthew Mellor said: “The time savings made possible by this automatic hardness tester will enable us to offer faster turnaround times and deliver even more accurate, repeatable and reproducible data. We chose Indentec because the company has an excellent reputation, with its own service and calibration engineers. Its equipment offers the highest-image resolution on the market.”

The hardness tester precisely measures surface hardness and case depth of metallic materials, with test loads between 100g and 10Kg.

Being automatic, it eliminates operator-related errors caused by eye strain, fatigue and inevitable inconsistencies.

The company said that loads, pressures and temperatures were constantly increasing in modern machinery, so metallic parts were subject to increasingly arduous operating conditions.

A spokesman said: “Hardness testing is often the best way of establishing that components will survive such stresses, becoming a critical part of the quality control process. Keighley Labs employs this physical testing method as quality assurance for its in-house heat treatment division, handling up to a dozen test samples daily.”

The machine is so big that Keighley Labs decided to enlarge its existing Test House microscope room.