FISKARS
Role
Time
Type
Team
:
:
:
:
Designer, Engineer
August 2021
Design Engineering
Individual Project
My Experience in Product Design of Hand Tools
My Co-op at Fiskars was my first introduction to product design and development. I worked with their hand tool department primarily identifying and correcting issues with pre-production samples.
My other tasks at this job revolved around ideation and prototyping of concepts in support of a new product category that we were preparing to launch.
Ideation
Here are some of the sketches I made during our plier ideation session. The concepts below focused on increasing mechanical advantage to cut with more force and enabling users to replace cutting blades without replacing the whole pliers.
Prototypes
Here are some prototypes of pliers that I modeled in SolidWorks then printed using a Stratasys Objet printer. The prototype on the left is a mockup of an idea for parallel action handles. The cutters on the right can be adjusted by sliding the head in and out to give different amounts of mechanical advantage.
Test Equipment
As a large part of my job was conducting and analyzing tests to ensure our product samples were meeting our requirements, I made a number of testing apparatus. The image on the left is a jig to consistently drop a folding knife to test opening force. The image on the right is a jig to measure the shock in wire cutter handles.
My Experience in Product Design of Hand Tools
My Co-op at Fiskars was my first introduction to product design and development. I worked with their hand tool department primarily identifying and correcting issues with pre-production samples.
My other tasks at this job revolved around ideation and prototyping of concepts in support of a new product category that we were preparing to launch.
Ideation
Here are some of the sketches I made during our plier ideation session. The concepts below focused on increasing mechanical advantage to cut with more force and enabling users to replace cutting blades without replacing the whole pliers.
Prototypes
Here are some prototypes of pliers that I modeled in SolidWorks then printed using a Stratasys Objet printer. The prototype on the left is a mockup of an idea for parallel action handles. The cutters on the right can be adjusted by sliding the head in and out to give different amounts of mechanical advantage.
Test Equipment
As a large part of my job was conducting and analyzing tests to ensure our product samples were meeting our requirements, I made a number of testing apparatus. The image on the left is a jig to consistently drop a folding knife to test opening force. The image on the right is a jig to measure the shock in wire cutter handles.