Spot Weldable Gauges

A spot weldable gauge needs three things to earn its place in a monitoring program: repeatable attachment, low drift, and survivability in wet or buried environments. At Kingmach, we address those with a practical production approach. The gauge backing is selected for thin, uniform weld points using portable capacitor-discharge units—common on most sites. This keeps the heat-affected zone small and avoids annealing the host steel, which matters when you’re working on high-strength rebar or structural plates. The sensing grid itself is a self-temperature-compensated foil matched to mild steel, so apparent strain from thermal expansion usually falls within a few microstrain per degree for typical structural steels. Users often add a stainless steel or rubber cover right after welding; we offer both as standard, with a compression-molded rubber version that’s held up well in buried applications where concrete shrinkage and groundwater push against the sensor for years. Cables exit through a strain-relieved, fully encapsulated lead-out that resists pull forces you’d see during rebar cage assembly. Because we stock multiple resistance values—typically 120, 350, and 1000 ohms—you can match the gauge to the readout equipment already on site, instead of buying new dataloggers. The active grid length varies by model, letting you target either global strain or highly localised stress concentrations depending on the measurement need. All gauges undergo a cycling and inspection step before shipment, where we check zero stability and insulation resistance at room temperature. That won’t guarantee perfect field data, but it removes the obvious duds. And if you’re working on a project that wants gauges pre-installed on steel coupons or pre-wired in a specific configuration, our technical team handles that through customisation—something we’ve done for several dam monitoring and deep excavation jobs where consistency across hundreds of sensors was the main ask. Finally, because we ship to over 30 countries, the packaging includes enough desiccant and vacuum seals to keep moisture out during ocean freight; once opened, the gauges are ready to weld within the shelf life marked on each pack.