Black & Decker recently faced a common problem for product designers: how to best design complex, organic shapes when repairing existing components or expanding an existing product line.

by David Mantey

Black & Decker’s Hardware & Home Improvement produce artisan-style products that are designed to look hand-crafted.

Black & Decker’s Hardware & Home Improvement had acquired the Baldwin Hardware business with two elite door hardware product lines, Kensington and Versailles. The artisan-style products, which were designed to look hand-crafted, had been produced by the business unit for over 15 years. But as all good things come to an end, so was the story of the old tooling working on its last legs before it was decommissioned. To manufacture the highly detailed, organic shapes, the tooling was made in an unusual way — using a 3-D digital pantograph device off of an antique master. 

While the old tooling has not broken yet, it had reached the end of life as predicted by the engineers and toolmakers – and the team realized it was living on borrowed time. Designers needed to recreate a replacement tool, but the third-party firm that initially created the tool did not provide the CAD data at the time of supplying the tool — it supplied only the tool. CAD availability became a moot issue anyway, since third-party firm was no longer around to cut a new tool.
 
“Baldwin has had this tooling for decades,” says Jay Czerwinski, Director of Industrial Design for Black and Decker’s Hardware & Home Improvement. “Basically, this tooling was made by hand using old world practices at the time, not CAD modeling … When you want a tool replacement nowadays, the technology that is used is from the digital world to create replacement tooling and it would be very difficult [in a short amount of time] to create replicas of the original tool.”

The tool had been worn down over a period of time and doing a laser scan of the product would not offer a good representation of what the original product may have looked like. The team not only had to recreate the tool, but they had to recreate a tool that was sharper and slightly different than what had existed up until that point.

“We’re trying to go back to something that is sharper and more towards the original, but not so far as to alienate recent customers that have purchased a softer looking component,” says Czerwinski.
 
The Kensington and Versailles product lines are handle sets, normally for a front door to a home. Typically, people don’t have multiple front doors side-by-side, so the chances of someone having an older component and then adding a newer one is fairly slim, but it’s still something in the methodology and care of attention to detail that Baldwin demands. Black & Decker wanted to have that consideration for the customer.

When it was time to replace the old tooling, it made no sense to recreate new tooling the old fashioned way, and risk compliance to ISO9001 and other manufacturing requirements. From a business perspective, Black & Decker wanted to keep selling this product line, even though the current manufacturing volume is only 1,500 a year, lower than in previous years. The team’s challenge was to digitally recreate the old tooling, while still conserving the hand-crafted look, so there would be a CAD file to use for manufacturing going forward.
 
“Baldwin has a legacy group of products that have been around for a long time and you just couldn’t discontinue them,” adds Czerwinski. “If there’s damage and it needs to be replaced, or a customer wants to update the look or finish, you’d want to match what was there already.” Customers run into similar situations when constructing an addition to an existing architectural building or when adding a new separate building to the grounds.

 “When these tools do reach the end of their useful life, if it is a product that doesn’t warrant a new tool, sometimes they will be rationalized out of the catalog,” says Elliot Schneider, an industrial designer with Black & Decker. “This [process] is only done for tools for products that are still selling at a high enough number that it warrants a retooling.”

Recreating From Digital Tooling

To create the new digital tooling, Black & Decker started with scans made from the current tool.

To create the new digital tooling, Black & Decker started with scans made from the current tool. The difference in the parts is evident from using a worn, older tool. The new parts are softer in detail than the original design. The new tool would need many features to be brought to life and sharpened up. The team used FreeForm 3-D modeling system from SensAble Technologies to quickly design and 'fill in’ areas, re-creating and enhancing digital models of the tooling and sharpening details.
 
“They just gave me the original hardware and I had to match it,” says Black & Decker Designer Yos Singtoroj. “The only way I could do it was look at the original hardware and use artistic skills to duplicate that. With FreeForm, I don’t know any other software that I could’ve used to accomplish that task; it was almost like clay sculpting in the computer.”

One of Singtoroj’s challenges was that some of the original data that was given to him was a laser scan of an old product. “I had a laser scan as a reference, but it’s almost like a copy of a copy. The tooling has been worn down. Most of the time I had to recreate the details from scratch,” adds Singtoroj. “The information doesn’t come in perfectly; there are some anomalies that need to be cleaned up a little bit. There were some areas with bumps or holes that needed to be fixed.”

The team was not only using FreeForm as an artistic tool, but as a manufacturing clean-up tool for streamlining the process. When you start with scan data of the original plate, it really isn’t that useful. It is a place to start creating data from, but the finished geometry was a sort of hybrid of Pro\E for the more geometric elements of the plate as well as the back of the plate where the mechanics are located. The FreeForm portion of it is actually integrated into Pro\E, which allows the data size of the finished product to be much smaller than a scanned piece of data. It also allows the elemental details created in FreeForm to be used in similar products across the same family.
 
An STL file was created that allowed the new tooling to be milled with a CNC machine. Designers exported IGES from FreeForm to Pro\E to combine their artistic work with that of the engineers – concurrent engineering for time/resource effectiveness. The final tool was cut from Pro\E data.

“One of the challenges was the methodology used in determining when ProEngineer was appropriate, and when it was appropriate to have the FreeForm data,” says Schneider. “We had to determine how they would be merged most effectively. You want to keep the file size manageable and the engineering components separated from the fine art.”

Recreating the missing detail meant creating complex, highly detailed, organic shapes that would aesthetically match and fit with the legacy products.

Recreating the missing detail meant creating complex, highly detailed, organic shapes that would aesthetically match and fit with the legacy products. The recreation required enhancing the scanned-in file – first with some surface healing to eliminate unusual triangulation that occurs in any scan file – and then to sharpen the edges of the scanned-in tooling.
 
Sample parts were then created through a series of wax and epoxy castings in a soft tool that simulates how the forging process will further soften up the details. Because of the softening in the forging process and because the final tooling must undergo another buffing and polishing process that will further soften the edges, the new tooling design had to have just the right amount of additional sharpening, but not so much that the products would look machine-made.

Design-friendly features and cross-functionality enabled the efficient completion of this tooling project, particularly the speed and flexibility they had working with digital clay to pull, tug, and extrude the evolving shapes on screen easily and intuitively until they were precisely as needed.