Inside D&D’s product testing laboratory
Walk into D&D Technologies’ product testing area at their Sydney headquarters and you hear it before you see it. The steady, rhythmic percussion of pneumatic gates opening and closing, over and over, at a pace no human hand could sustain. Eleven gates. Hundreds of thousands of repetitions before a single product leaves the building.
“Slamming a gate tens of thousands of times would drive most people to madness,” says Scott Cosby, D&D Technologies Design Manager. “But for us, it’s the sound of rigorous quality control. We have one rule: if we haven’t tried to break it, we won’t sell it.”
Scott Cosby has been with D&D for more than twenty years. He’s heard that sound a lot. And he’s never lost his appreciation for what it means.
A few years ago, the testing facility went through a significant upgrade. The old six-gate system was decommissioned and a newly designed arrangement of eleven gates was fabricated and installed, nearly doubling D&D’s concurrent testing capacity. More gates mean more products tested at once, faster development cycles, and more frequent validation checks on products already in the range.
Testing in real conditions
The eleven gates handle different conditions. Five are undercover, running at a maximum opening angle of 90 degrees, useful for controlled testing of specific hardware configurations. The other six are positioned outdoors, fully exposed to whatever the Sydney weather delivers, and they open to a full 180 degrees.
“We take real pride in the outdoor testing capability,” says Scott. “Gate hardware lives outside. It deals with harsh sun, salt air, cold mornings, and heavy rain. If we only tested under controlled conditions, we’d only know half the story. The outdoor gates tell us the full story.”
Products run through those outdoor gates from the earliest prototype stage through to the final sample. Every stage is tested to ensure the product that goes out to market meets D&D’s standards for durability and toughness. [endif]
A warranty that really means something
D&D backs its products with clear, product-specific limited warranties. Scott is clear about what those guarantees are built on.
“People ask how we can stand behind our warranties. This is how. We know exactly what our products go through before they leave us. We understand their tolerances, their behaviour under sustained load and exposure, and where their limits are. When a fencing contractor installs a D&D latch or hinge on a gate that matters, it’s been tested to perform as expected — and supported by a warranty that reflects that.”
This Australian Made Week (18–24 May), we’re celebrating what it means when a product is made and tested right here, to the highest standards and under the toughest conditions. That’s what assurance is built from.