Testing time for vacuum cleaner maker

A company that designs and build custom test equipment for the manufacturing and research industries has developed a cost saving sub-system that allows eight dynamometer test rigs to share a single calibration unit based on a Digital TorqSense transducer from Sensor Technology Ltd.

The company, 1st Pass of Westbury in Wiltshire, started out as a regional systems integrator for National Instruments’ LabVIEW software packages. However, it quickly realised that there was a considerable need for a wider service encompassing all aspects of test rig design and build.

Founder and Managing Director, Chris Turner, explains: “Engineers involved in either research or quality control need test rigs, but designing them is not their forte. They tend to focus only on the immediate requirements so tend towards inflexible, mono-functional designs. Six months later when new requirements emerge, they have to build another rig”.

“We saw this as a gap in the market and decided to offer the a full package whereby we would interview the engineers to establish likely future requirements, then design and build a test rig or test station that addresses all of these. This includes electrical and mechanical design, software, firmware, support systems, etc. We will also install, calibrate and maintain the rigs.”