Open House Website says;
Proudly carved over the door are the words ‘Facts not Opinions’. Inside, the authentic sight - and smell - of Kirkaldy’s Testing and Experimenting Works is a unique and direct link with an ingenious age of engineering.
I’ve long wanted to visit this unique bit of Victorian engineering heritage in Southwark but never managed to align available time and their opening days. The works own website at https://www.testingworks.org.uk/about gives the whole story of David Kirkaldy and his pioneering work of testing structural materials in a standardised and scientific way. The works remained in his family until 1965 and continued to operate under new ownership until 1974. A museum trust was set up in 1983 to retire and maintain the machines and the works and in 2014 the works and the huge Universal Testing Machine are listed at Grade II*.
Stepping through the front door of the Victorian building you are confronted by the almost 50 foot long Universal Testing Machine which dominates the room. Using water hydraulic pressure and a mechanical linkage the machine can exert a load of 440 tons on the material to be tested and it’s big enough to test large building components. There are numerous examples of iron, steel. and other material test pieces displayed that have been tested to breaking point. The museum volunteers are happy to explain how the beast functions, the history of the works, and what they’ve needed to do to restore the machine to working order.
As well as the Universal Testing Machine the museum has a collection of other testing machines of varying vintages - nearly all of which are old enough to be pre-metric so visiting students first need to be introduced to pounds, inches, and pounds per square inch and the conversion factors to change them into the SI units they’re more familiar with. There are machines to test seemingly everything from the tensile strength of parachute cord and webbing to the hardness of stone samples.
It’s a very un-museum-like space, very much a works building and since this is filled with old oily machinery from a time when mechanism guards were not considered necessary and which was operated by people who knew what they were doing you are reminded to watch where you’re putting your fingers 😀
It’s a fascinating place, particularly if you are interested in machines, run by very nice people and I really need to get back on one of the premium tours when they actually run the machine and break stuff!
There are more photos in my Open House 2024 Flickr Album.
More info including opening times on the Kirkaldy’s Testing Works website
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