Joe Naylor recently started to work at my firm in the testing area and was looking for advice is stress fracturing a device used to keep little pieces of you in place while you’re suppine after surgery.  He has somewhat powerful thumbs capable of delivering a near lethal nipple-ectomy, but even they couldn’t produce the simulated breakage requested.  I tried to think of what a person recovering from surgery could reasonably do and came up with the following:I placed the testing rig in a bench vice and using one dead-blow hammer as a landing zone on the part normally held with your thumb, I smashed that dead-blow hammer with another dead-blow hammer.  Strangely enough, the 1/8″ column of plastic held against the stainless steel wedge impacted by a hammer hitting another hammer broke under these totally reasonable real-world conditions…

Please note that in the context of medical device testing “reasonable break method” is defined as “anything doable to the device even if it requires invoking super-mutant powers or the phrase ‘so Hercules needs a colostomy’ regardless of the currently applicable laws of physics.”