This week’s selection is the amazing DIY Material Testing Machine by YouMagine designer Arjan.
This item is not entirely 3D printed, but it does make significant use of 3D printed components. The idea is to provide anyone with the ability to make their own materials testing machine by implementing what’s known as the “Charpy Impact Test”. If you don’t happen to be an engineer, you might want to check out this video that explains how it works.
And if you’re too impatient to watch the video, it describes a pendulum that swings to impact a material sample. The energy absorbed by the impact is measured and reflects the impact strength of the sample.
We believe such a machine could be quite useful for home designers and tinkerers that need to verify the strength of the components used in machines they’re working on. If you’d like to try it, consider downloading the STL files and instructions at the YouMagine link below.
Building the Tester requires a number of parts beyond the 3D printed components, including “2 bearings, tube and connectors, some wood.” The design is a work in progress; while some successful results have been obtained, we suspect the community will be improving on the design over the next few months.
And we also hope this project inspires others to create different types of testing machines to enable more kinds of measurements.