hunter force indicator /tie bar strain gauge . still used ?

are these type of scale gauges still being used ? hunter mod. d-50 , l-5 and l-20 along with a ims co. tie bar strain gauge ?

I used Hunter and other brand hand-held spring scales when I worked in a vehicle manufacturer's engineering labs for some years after 1963 until moving to the design area. They were handy for many odd jobs like how much force is required to push a gas pedal down or to release a door handle. We called them fish scales. I know of no better or simpler tool for the purpose, though we also made and used electronic devices with foil strain gages for some force measurements, especially for large forces.

The tie bar thing looks like a very narrowly specialized device that I have never seen before. In this device, the term strain gage seems to be a functional description, not implying the use of electronic foil strain gages.

Larry

I have one of the IMS tie bar strain gauges. They are nothing more than a dial indicator mounted between two magnetic V blocks. Their purpose is comparative measurement of the stretch of the four tie bars on a typical injection molding press. Seldom used (although the do have a graph that allow conversion of the amount of stretch to clamp tonnage) but indispensable when replacing a broken tie bar, to ensure all four are sharing the load equally, which does affect the parallelism of the press platens.

Dennis