Product Development Consultant

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Richard Farrington brings 45 years of experience in the area of mechanical design engineering, specializing in new product development, plastic part design, mechanisms and injection mold design. His mechanical aptitude and focus on details have benefitted well-known companies such as Playskool, Coleco, Black & Decker, and CooperSurgical as he has taken product designs from concept to production. His creative solutions are represented by more than 14 patents.
 

Mr. Farrington is currently owner of Startwell Design, offering freelance mechanical design services.

Before this, Richard was Principal Designer for CooperSurgical. A few highlights of his ten years there include designing the flexible arm link assembly on the Ally Uterine Positioning System as well as the Ally’s disposable adapter drape which successfully interfaces with two very different shaped devices. He also designed the Endosee Advance cannula and did much concept design work, prototyping, and testing of samples. Other products required devising a new way to prototype an elastomeric button in a housing assembly, designing a unique lock and release mechanism, and designing vacuum formed trays for packaging.
 

Prior to CooperSurgical, Richard was Design Engineer for Rexam, a cosmetic perfume pump manufacturer. He introduced the company to SolidWorks, using it to quickly develop customer models and drawings for the many unique bottle, cap, and pump assemblies used in the perfume industry. He created over fifty pages of custom tutorials unique to their business and trained other staff in its use. He and a teammate also led a project to trouble-shoot an assembly process that had intermittent, line-stopping problems. The root cause was identified, a solution was tested and recommended, along with the cost analysis. The cost investment was turned down, and the company continued to have problems.
 

Before this, as Senior Design Engineer of Risdon International, Inc., a cosmetics packaging company, Richard created design solutions earning customer confidence and resulting in new business. He also designed manufacturing equipment supporting automatic assembly, invented a clever mechanism for a one-handed lip gloss and provided design support for their injection blow molding operation.
 

Prior to joining Risdon, Richard spent ten years designing injection molds for Spectrum Plastics Molding, a custom molder specializing in precision, strip feed molding of connectors and MEMS (Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems) packages. He introduced Spectrum to the benefits of solid modeling, creating both a library of standard parts used in their molds and a parametric model of an injection mold which improved the mold design cycle by 15%. Richard further shortened the mold build cycle by utilizing a “parallel development” process, coordinating the acquisition of mold frames and components with the release of partial information. He designed a number of unique injection molds with very challenging shutoffs and side actions, and he also rectified a problem with two existing molds that had problems with their lifter galling.
 

Before Spectrum Plastics, Richard was Senior Designer for Black & Decker Household Products, based in Shelton, CT. He served as Lead Designer in a team environment on two new lines of steam irons, the Surge Xpress and the Quick’n Easy. Each line included ten to twelve models for both the 120-volt North American market and the 220-volt European market, and earned about $30 million in sales.
 

At Black & Decker, he also served as Project Leader for the Electric Work Light, a 120-volt version of the popular SnakeLight. His design greatly exceeded the product specification by surviving 10 six-foot drops onto a concrete floor with no failures.
 

Previously, Richard spent a combined seven years as a Product Engineer in the toy industry at both Playskool and Coleco Industries. He managed programs from concept to production on very tight schedules, including the introduction of the first four Rambo Action Figures as well as the Flintstone Kids figures. He also invented mechanisms to fit within the shape constraints required by sculpted toy designs.
 

Richard began his career as a draftsman and designer for Burron Medical Products (now B. Braun). He learned plastic part design there, and designed a three-piece cone filter assembly that utilized a single ultrasonic weld joint to hermetically seal three parts together.
 

Richard Farrington is a Certified SolidWorks Professional.