Testing expertise from Turnkey
Based centrally in the UK and shipping to a broad range of international industries, Turnkey Instruments designs, patents, develops and manufactures its suite of brake testing units in-house. This capability, Turnkey says, has allowed it to consistently deliver and support brake testing units globally during very difficult trading times.
The suite of brake testing units are regularly used by HGV, PSV and LCV fleets and workshops, come with multipoint UKAS accredited calibration, and are CE marked and RoHS compliant. To meet the latest EU and UN standards, the BrakeSafe unit directly records and prints the mean fully developed deceleration. This is the mean deceleration recorded between 80 per cent and 10 per cent of the test speed.
All tests are annotated with the time and date, vehicle identity, test conditions and type of brake tested. The BrakeSafe range includes; BrakeSafe, Micro BrakeSafe, BrakeSafe Classic, Agricultural BrakeSafe, G Meter and G Meter+.
The BrakeSafe is self-contained, portable and easy to use, says Turnkey. It can be located anywhere in the vehicle. It is self-levelling and will automatically align itself with the direction of travel. For basic operation, no connections need to be made to the vehicle.
Optionally, the instrument can be used to measure and record the force applied to the brake pedal: in this case a transducer is attached to the pedal. This also allows the delay time of the braking system to be determined.
The instrument can be pre-loaded with 99 vehicle names, 70 trailers, 16 test conditions, four brake types and eight examiner names. Each name can also be edited via the instrument’s single click control.
BrakeSafe has bright, clear, sunlight-readable pass and fail lights which correspond to user-defined pass thresholds. Individual thresholds can be set for each of the four brake types. The backlit graphical display allows the user to review the deceleration, speed, and distance versus time graphs without printing.
BrakeSafe can also be used to measure and record the acceleration profile of the vehicle and produce a graph of how it accelerates, and the time taken to reach a given speed. There is additionally an HGV trailer testing mode that may be used to determine HGV trailer brake efficiency.
Further features highlighted include measurement of in-line deceleration and sideways pull, DVSA approval, and an SD memory card to save results for transfer to PC.
Turnkey adds that its partners can expect to receive first-class support and ongoing service, coupled with excellent aftersales for all of the products manufactured – emphasising its team’s specialist industry knowledge and its continuous investment in research and development of newer versions of the BrakeSafe suite.
