Good feedback, thanks!
What I'm trying to accomplish is just to get a very rough idea of how much weight can be supported by a part made of a specific type/brand/color filament, and based on that decide which filament brands I should buy in the future, and which cheapo brands might be crappy but are good enough for stuff I do not care about much. For most of what I do DIY design-wise, I do not need to care much about the mechanical properties of the material beyond the general characteristics of PLA vs PETG vs ABS vs etc, but the mechanical properties are a bit more important when choosing brands. And once in a long while I do actually need a rough idea of what strength characteristics a specific filament has. For example, having a very rough idea of how thick the shell of the plastic VESA monitor hanger I made is good'nuff not to worry when printed with fill-in-the-blank-brand PETG without making it 20mm thick with solid infill. The first hanger I made broke, the second version is good'nuff and is still supporting my monitor, but this was pure trial and error with zero actual calculation. No, it is not 20mm thick with solid infill, that was an exageration, but I still have no idea how near or far the plastic is from it's breaking point.
For what I'm doing today, a very simplistic tensile strength test is sufficient. I decided I needed to do some basic (comparative) strength testing after I took identical plastic parts that I printed with 3 different brands, all PETG, and broke them in half with a couple pairs of pliers. 2 broke cleanly at the weak point and a partial break on a thicker part (one brand "felt" a little stronger than the other), and the 3rd brand just turned to taffy all the way down the middle. Doing a second test with the "taffy" one resulted in a complete break even through the thicker region.
Thanks for the CNC Kitchen link. From the linked video it looks like the type of "gauge" I am looking for is a crane scale that holds the peak/max value. It would be realllllly nice if the CNC Kitchen guy had data available for all types/brands/colors of filament or if manufacturers would provide that data themselves. As much as I'd like a setup like he has, a simple test rig of a crane scale suspending the printed test object, with some type of manual lever attached to the lower end of the test object to provide enough tensile force to break the plastic should be enough for a quick test...
At least that was the idea in my head. I would much rather have the full force vs strain (I think is the term) graph, plus any other measured characteristics that might be useful for one design or another. And the overly simplistic test rig I have in mind would be useless for something like TPU, but a setup like what the CNC Kitchen guy has is way beyond what I have time for.