Creative Mechanisms is offering the services of our Product Viability Testing Lab. We are building custom machinery and test rigs to prove the functionality of both prototypes and finished products. If you have a product that you are launching and need to know how many activations of a switch can be made before failure for example, we will build a machine that will activate the switch and count the number of operations. Need to know the tensile strength of a part? We can make custom fixtures that allow us to test the tensile strength of your parts.
One of the most frequent questions we get about our CNC cut living hinge models is: How many cycles will the hinge last before it breaks? So, we built a machine that opens and closes the hinged part and counts the number of times it completes a cycle. How many cycles did it take before the machined polypropylene hinge broke? We gave up after we got to 126,000. It was still going strong.
We thought it would be interesting to test living hinges in other materials too, so we machined hinges in LDPE (26,483 Cycles), HDPE (2,889 Cycles) and PET (268 Cycles) materials and ran them through the same machine.
Since each test scenario is different it requires some very creative machine configurations to set up the right test but creative solutions are what we are all about. Some tests are relatively simple and can be done on one of the standard pieces of equipment we have but others require some very elaborate setups. Whatever it takes, we can figure it out for you.