Delivering a powerful and reliable industrial-grade product
The environment for industrial equipment is demanding. At places like offshore drilling rigs and chemical plants, the stakes are high, and the tools are heavy. Design Central’s team knows this from experience. So when Bolttech Mannings approached us to enhance its pneumatic torque wrench enclosure, we moved right into our integrated design and engineering approach. The torque wrench, which is driven by air through a motor, sets and adjusts industrial-grade nuts and bolts. The enclosure portion of Bolttech Mannings’ product had some areas with opportunities for improvement, including Design for Manufacturing Assembly (DFMA) challenges, air leaks and sound issues. Our fresh perspective, thorough analysis and subsequent testing and validation resulted in an improved, reliable and competitive product that is on the market today.
Client
- Bolttech Mannings
Industry
- Commercial
Capabilities
- Product Design
- Engineering
- Prototyping
Objective: Create inventive solutions for performance and DFMA challenges in Bolttech Mannings’ pneumatic torque wrench enclosure.
Analyzing to improve + enhance
Our exploration began with a teardown of the client’s current product so we could fully understand our Point A. In other words, we wanted to know what was currently working and what wasn’t. We took a look at competitor offerings to get a sense of the industrial pneumatic wrench market and researched other industries and technologies for potential solutions to tough-to-solve air leak and sound challenges. Our many early concepts kept in mind aesthetics but also Bolttech Mannings’ manufacturing requirements and constraint. These included how the product is put together, specific materials used and what could and couldn’t be changed throughout production. From the start, we knew that the structural integrity of this product, which was often thrown around in those harsh environments, could not be underestimated.
Rapid prototypes guide us to solution
When it came time to start testing our big ideas, we put on hearing protection equipment and rolled out rapid prototypes. We explored how the air flowed through its housing and how it could be better trapped in that housing, and we experimented with new ways to soften the jet engine-like sound. A good amount of research went into what materials would be best for a filter on the exhaust port that would simultaneously muffle sound without choking the airflow. Human factors played a substantial role, as our design team examined the hand grip area to respond to engineering changes. Once our solutions proved worthy, we handed over tool-ready CAD files.