About The Project

The Cooper Mechanical Testing Team formed in the fall of 2009 and was headed by two sophomores of the Cooper Union, Calvin Ball and Dale Short. The focus of the project for the subsequent year and half was to construct a "home made," or rather, "student made" mechanical tester. This project was successful, and more concerning it may be found on Dale's website. The mechanical tester was a great accomplishment, but the Cooper Mechanical Testing Team wanted to take it a step further. In beginning of 2011, the Cooper Mechanical Testing Team, equipped with several new members, decided to interface the existing mechanical tester with a CNC Machine . The existing mechanical tester, which was a mock up of an industry standard mechanical tester, was not very accurate and couldn't perform mulitple tests. Our team saw that by harnessing the motion capabilities of a CNC machine (both in terms of range of motion and accuracy), we could successfully augment our mechanical tester and reach bounds not accessible by even the highest quality commercial mechanical testers.