Company’s Job: Giving Products the Third Degree

If the furniture at QualMark Corp.’s lab in Huntington Beach starts jostling, staff sit back and relax.

After all, at QualMark’s Accelerated Reliability Test Center, clients pay to have their products shake, rattle and roll.

“We get other people’s electronics and we try to break them,” said Preston Wilson, QualMark president and chief executive. “We fry them, freeze them and figure out ways to shake it apart.”

The company’s equipment performs stress tests on products ranging from consumer electronics to digital weapons systems. The system simulates years of abuse in a matter of hours, which helps a manufacturer catch flaws in products before they head out to the public.

Objects can be cooled with liquid nitrogen to as low as minus 100 degrees Celsius, or heated to as hot as 200 degrees Celsius. Or the products can vibrate and be tossed in six different directions and endure stress the equivalent of 50 Gs.

The company, headquartered in Denver, has seven other labs nationwide like the one in Huntington Beach. The Orange County lab, which opened this spring, is one of the firm’s busiest centers.

“California has a lot of companies that need our kind of service,” said Eric Gerlach, managing engineer for the Huntington Beach lab. “It’s kind of fun to break things for a living.”

For manufacturers, outside testing can mean big savings. Hiroshi Hamada, president of Ricoh Corp., recently estimated that a defect cost $35 to fix during the design period but jumped to $690,000 once the product hit the consumer market.

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com