I've a problem here, my boss need me to measure the hardness of a piece of copper strip, but we didn't have any hardness test machine (vickers, durometer, brinell etc) to do that. But we do have a tensile machine. Can i do something with the tensile test to measure hardness?

 

Your help is really appreciated

I have never heard of a tensile test machine being used to check hardness. You would do well to send a sample to a metallurgical test facility for the test. Around here it would not be expensive (<$100 US) for a simple hardness check. I imagine any correlation between hardness and tensile strength would be very inaccurate.

Yeah i know that we can't get a read from tensile machine for hardness. I explained to my boss and he understand. But he said that if the material is hard, the material will elongate before failed during the tensile test. So one question come in my mind, are ductile material conform to be hard and brittle material must all be soft?

Actually, it is generally the other way around. Brittle implies hard and ductile implies soft. Think diamonds, very hard but also quite brittle, while lead is very soft but ductile as heck.

That makes sense. When we use Vickers test, soft material is easy to be indented by diamond while hard material is opposite.

HI Newbies kid,

 

In south America nearly all metallurgists use hardness testers like the Tru- blue II hardness tester made by United Calibration Corporation which uses an indenter.They are fairly accurate,

See more herehttp://www.unitedcalibration.com/

 

Jim paker