
Caldwell Manufacturing – Adopting Additive Manufacturing Throughout the Organization
The Customer
Caldwell Manufacturing is a global window and door hardware manufacturer based in upstate New York. “We’re an integrated supply partner,” says Caldwell Manufacturing CEO, Eric Mertz. “The springs that hold a window or door open, the hardware, the locks, the latches, all the mechanical hardware that makes a window or door operate, that’s what we’re focused on.”
The company was founded in 1888 and spent the first of its years as a hardware manufacturing company. In the 1920s, the company diversified into building-related products. Caldwell now ships to thousands of customers in 70 different countries and has factories in the US, UK, India, and Mexico. The team is responsible for everything from design ideation to final product — they develop and commercialize Caldwell’s components while simultaneously creating injection moulds, springs, and more.
The Challenge
For any piece of the window or door hardware they make, the team at Caldwell also needs to make holding fixtures, assembly fixtures, and error-proofing fixtures — which were all designed in-house and cut from steel through a third-party supplier. The internal tooling often took up to eight weeks to design and develop, and certain components had to be sourced from overseas, which led to product development cycles of anywhere between 6-12 months.
A single job would require people to look for outside quotes or internal tool room quotes, and any changes to internal tooling were time-consuming and expensive, so improvements needed to be significant to justify. ”Sometimes businesses just end up layered with bureaucracy,” says Mertz. “And one of the reasons people leave their jobs is because they don’t feel connected. They don’t feel they’ve got the authority and the resources to do their job.”
In the company’s strategic planning meeting in 2010, the executives looked at what kind of technologies were going to be disruptive and unanimously agreed that 3D printing would be the key to their success. In 2014, Caldwell purchased its first FDM plastic 3D printer. “3D printing was a technology that we were watching for a couple of years,” says Mertz. “And as its price points come down, it’s one of those things that encouraged the buying decision.” Initially, the printer was brought in for rapid prototyping, but the team quickly realized that the printer was only able to help them evaluate form and fit, but not function.
“We wanted to put the control within our own hands to allow for quicker iterations on our product development.”
— Rick deNormand, Product Engineering Manager, Caldwell Manufacturing
Many of the parts Caldwell Manufacturing needed were made out of metal, and the team found plastic 3D printer filament was not adequate to use when testing the strength of their parts. “The plastic 3D printer that we onboarded really resolved much of our external prototyping needs for plastic parts,” says Rick deNormand, Product Engineering Manager at Caldwell. “But what we really needed was to explore and to introduce metal 3D printing as well.” Selective laser melting (SLM) metal 3D printers didn’t fit the need of the organization, as the use of powder was too difficult to handle and the cost to bring it in was too high. The team set to work looking for the optimal solution: an affordable filament-based metal 3D printer that could easily be used within the facility.
Download the PDF to know how Markforged 3D printing technology saved Caldwell Manufacturing’s time and money by 3D printing tools, and prototypes using metal 3D printing technology.