Mechanical Testing Equipment

Located in C. A.P.E.R. Lab - G. G. Brown

Turn on the Instron. Wait until the thing goes through its self testing to decide that the memory is lost. Press E (enable) on the tethered controller. Jog the cross head up and down with the tethered control (This is necessary for some reason or the computer won't "see" the machine) and set your gage length.
Set the cross head speed on the keypad. Jog the crosshead with the keypad control (Also necessary, I think) and return to gage set position.
Start the computer and pray. --And Wait.

Restart the computer in DOS mode (under the shutdown menubar button). Change directories to MT:
cd ..
cd MT
Run MT and go through the usual Instron interface.

When finished testing, translate data to ASCII and save on a floppy to get it to a real computer.

If you have a problem - the blue screen that won't even budge, or the computer decides not to talk to the instron, you need to turn off both machine and computer and go through the list above. Once the connection is broken, this seems to be the only way to get it back. Skip a step, and it won't work. Also check the heavy cable connecting the instron to computer, it comes loose often.

Measure sample cross sections and set up a spreadsheet to calculate the correction to the raw data. The raw data is output as INCHES extension, and POUNDS force even though the computer report is all metric and corrected for sample size and gage length. Nice, huh?
(lbs x 0.2248 = N)
Import the raw data into IgorPRPro and multiply each data set (called a wave) by its correction.
Make a table of all the data runs for later use.
Plot all curves to check for mistakes and for presentation.
Measure the slope of a reasonable section of the elastic region and record in Excel.
Copy the two columns from the table in Igor to columns in Excel, and set one contitional cell to find the ultimate tensile strength [MAX(B2:B200) - MIN(B2:B200)] and one to sum up the area under the curve for toughness:[(A3-A2)*(B3-B2)]