HARDNESS LABORATORY

Portable Hardness Tester by Newage Industries, Inc.

Most of the hardness testers used by Touchstone are designed to operate in a laboratory environment. However, there are times when a sample is too large to fit into a hardness machine or a hardness must be made on-site away from the laboratory.

Touchstone has a Portable Hardness Tester designed to perform hardness in the standard Rockwell ranges, A, B, C as well as 15N, which is in the superficial Rockwell scale.

The ranges used for Rockwell hardness are an expression of the wide range of material hardness measurements performed. The “C” range is typically used for hardened materials like tool steels, while the “A”, “B”, and “D” ranges are for softer materials like carbon steels, brass, bronze, aluminum, etc. The “N” ranges indicate superficial hardness measurements which are performed on materials as thin as 0.006″ in the case of the 15N scale. For any material thinner than 0.006″ microhardness measurement on mounted, polished samples must be employed.