CUSTOM DESIGN ENGINEERING - Hyster Wire Driver

The Challenge

It’s a simple fact of life: From time to time, you’re going to be handed the occasional curveball.

This was certainly the case for long term ControlTek partners at Hyster when they discovered a certain tried-and-true part for a 1980s-era factory robot wire driver had become obsolete, rendering the product unbuildable in its current iteration. Since the products were still highly sought after in the market, Hyster needed to find a solution that could help them ensure the products’ continued availability.

To make matters even more interesting, there was currently no existing product documentation to serve as a starting point for an updated design.

Our Solution

Fearing a completely new design might be necessary to build new products and maintain the current inventory in the market, Hyster came to ControlTek to take advantage of our technical expertise in order to find a solution that was both effective and cost efficient.

Our engineers proposed a solution that could solve the problem of creating a new custom part without adding a lot of additional costs, using reverse engineering to find a workable custom solution. To do so, the engineers “spoofed” a new part in order to make it work with the existing board. 

The Results

With this custom approach, a full--and costly--redesign was no longer needed. Today, Hyster continues to sell and maintain the factory robots in the market and has remained a long term partner of ControlTek for more than 30 years.