[sdiy] [OT] lessons learned from vibration table

[Tim Ressel]

Hi,

I was talking to my buddy at Agilent when he told me
about some inexperienced lab monkeys who improperly
fixtured a prototype to a vibration table. The test
was designed to give the unit a 30g 'bump' that lasts
15mS with a half-sine shape. The vib table travels up
first, then down. The fixture holding the unit to the
table was too flexible, allowing the unit to leave the
table for an instant at the top of the travel. Then it
would bang back down on the table, which has a mass
many times that of the unit. The unit was several
hundred g's instead of 30, and soon was destroyed
completely. This was a rather expensive prototype and
the customers were not happy.

The moral: expensive equipment and cheap help don't go
together.

--Tim

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com