Weak Ductile Materials: Easily Broken by Traction?

[serbring]

I teach soil mechanics and I introduce to my students brittle and ductile materials. Failure of brittle materials is obvious for them but not for ductile materials. Do you know any ductile material that can be easily broken by traction? Unfortunately I do not have any tensile testing machine so I can apply just a little traction force with limited weight (less than 30kg). I just want to show to them that the failure plane is not perpedicular to the traction force.Thanks

 

[Bystander]

Lead (Pb) .

 

[CWatters]

+1 Try electrical solder.

 

[serbring]

Great ideas! I'll try them! thanks

 

[rbelli1]

Try to find solid core solder if you go that route. The flux core will only complicate the fracture point.

BoB

 

[Tom.G]

Putty or modeling clay.

 

[Rx7man]

A step stronger than solder would be copper wire.. something like 14ga solid electrical house wiring is pretty soft, and with nothing more than a vice and a couple tools can be stretched to it's breaking point