In 1832, Fiskars founded Finland’s first cutlery mill and over time the production range extended from knives to include forks and scissors. Forty years ago, Fiskars launched the world’s first plastic-handled scissors, and it’s been producing them ever since. Today, there are two production units where scissors, gardening tools, knife sharpeners and axes are produced. When demand was at its peak, over seven million pairs of scissors were manufactured, says Carl-Olof Holm, technical director at Fiskars. “Today, we manufacture about 3.5 million pairs of scissors here, but also nearly a million axes, and hundreds of thousands of garden cutting tools, to name a few of our products.”
Practical design and innovative solutions have been one of the cornerstones of Fiskars products, and the company’s products have claimed dozens of awards at design fairs around the world. This success story, or at least the most recent part of it, started with a successful marriage of plastics and steel, coupled with embracing new technology, including robotic automation.
There are ten robots in the injection moulding section of the production. They typically lift the handles of the gardening tools, feed them to the assembly and print the company logo on them. The biggest, and most recent, robot cell has two robots working in harmony, putting together garden cutters. An ABB IRB 2400L takes the handles out of the mould and then puts them in the assembly fixture while an ABB IRB 140 adds the blades and bolts into the assembly. The IRB 2400L then takes over again and sends the finished product to be packed.
Fiskars makes about thirty different kinds of scissors, in different sizes and blade shapes. When parts are loaded on a conveyor belt prior to heat treatment, they are first examined using a 3D vision system mounted on an ABB IRB 140. This enables the robot to pick the blades from a randomly scattered pile and then sort and orientate them so that they enter the heat treatment process correctly. Before plastic handles are added to make a pair of two-handed garden cutters, the blades are presented to two more IRB robots that sharpen the cutting edges. Known affectionately among workers at the plant as ‘Little Johnny’ and ‘Little Daisy’, these produce a subtly angled edge that is just a fraction of a millimetre wide.
Even though the Fiskar products are appear similar, they’re not identical, and that poses challenges for manufacturing. “We like to build the robot cells to be as flexible as possible so that we can switch the lines quickly or assemble several products at the same time,” Mr Holm explains. “The latest robot cell caters for two different shaft lengths, and three different blades, so we can manufacture six different products quite easily.”
At Fiskars, past and present meet without conflict or compromise. The axe was one of the first tools fashioned by man, but the seven different axe models that Fiskars manufactures are state-of-the art products. “The latest development is a PTFE coating that makes the axe easier and lighter to use,” explain Johan Holmberg and Harri Engstrom, who between them manage the production robots.
On the axe production line, the blades come to a coating station attached to large hangers in batches of 20. An ABB IRB 540 robot sprays the PTFE material on one side of the batch, then the hangers rotate so that all the other sides are coated. “This robot is so accurate that it uses 30% fewer PTFE materials than our previous system,” says Mr Engstrom. “Not only is it great for us financially, it has also made the process safer for the employees and much more environmentally friendly.”