Product Testing
Row your boat and see where you are going!

You will have all at some time had the opportunity to row a boat down the river. As you recall, the major problem is seeing where you are going as you facing backwards, did you hit anything?

It would be nice to row the boat and see where you are going, thus making life easier for all concerned, including you the rower. This has been done before using a simple linkage mechanism which effectively reverses the direction of the oars pulling in the water. The forces exerted on conventional rowlocks can be high when you are in an energetic mode or having to move a large load. The last thing you want to happen is for the fittings to fail and cause injury.

With this in mind, a client had a mechanical rowing system that required testing and the results would be used to aid further product development.

Our work involved performing stress calculations on the critical linkage elements and determining failure loads and modes. To confirm the findings, a series of test rigs were designed and built. These were fitted into a tensile tester and the load paths aligned to those encountered during normal operation of the new rowing mechanism. The force was gradually raised until failure occurred. The results were compared to those obtained from a standard rowlock to ensure similar performance was obtained. The information was used by the client to conduct further refinements to the new system thus aiding product development.

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