Salt-Spray Testing

Often fasteners, stampings, and fittings are the “forgotten part” of an assembly. They’re typically the smallest part of the cost of the final project. But not if they develop corrosion out in the field! Now the corrosion might just be cosmetic, but if you’re selling a million-dollar piece of machinery such as a heavy-duty construction crane, you can bet the buyer wants to see those fasteners gleaming in the sun for years to come, not covered with rust.

How can you have confidence that corrosion will not develop?

It’s simple. To quantify the corrosion resistance of a material, it is common practice to submit the material to harsher environments than normally encountered in service, hoping to accelerate the damage.

Salt-Spray chambers are universally accepted as the best tool for this job. It’s possible to subject parts to a 500 or 1000 our salt spray test that creates a very harsh environment. If the parts survive this test without corrosion, it’s an excellent indicator that the corrosion resistance will give a long service life in the field.

Most distributors don’t have such equipment in house, so they either can’t provide documented testing results or else must send the parts out to an accredited third-party lab, which drives up both testing time and costs, which of course are passed back to the customer. But with in-house equipment and capacity, Fast-Rite can circumvent those delays and provide accurate, reliable test data cost-effectively to our customers.

 Need some failure analysis? Testing on your components? Contact us today.