Five Months of Tooling: How the 311 Exit Device Was Made
A customer called at eleven at night asking for a price, came to the factory the next afternoon with a sample, and asked whether we could make it. Three moulds, three toolmakers, one pause of over a year, and five months of trial-and-correction later, the 311 existed. This is what buying a custom exit device actually costs a factory — and why a lead time on a tooled product is not the same number as a lead time on a catalogue one.
Insight
Johnson LiuDigital Communications, Canton HylandMA Digital Media, Johns Hopkins University
The phone rang at eleven at night and somebody was still in the office to answer it. The caller wanted unit prices on exit devices we already make. We quoted, and then the conversation turned: he wanted to come and see the parts in his hands, the next day.
He arrived the following afternoon with a colleague. They spent the visit going through the range, and they found several products that suited their own factory — not one. Then they produced a sample of something we did not make, and asked whether we could produce it. We said yes. That sample became the 311.
What follows is not a marketing story about responsiveness. It is an account of what the yes actually committed us to, written down because buyers asking for a custom exit device are quoted a price and a lead time, and almost never told what sits underneath them.
THREE MOULDS, THREE DIFFERENT TRADES. An exit device is not one material, so it is not one mould. The 311 needed three: an ABS mould for the push bar body, a steel stamping die for the pressed components, and a zinc-alloy die-casting mould for the cast parts. Before any of them could be cut there was wire-cutting and drawing — the geometry has to be fixed on paper and in the electrode before it is fixed in steel.
Each of those three moulds belongs to a different craftsman. They are not interchangeable skills: the man who can hold a tolerance in a zinc die is not the man who knows how ABS shrinks as it cools, and neither of them sets up a stamping die. So every correction is a three-way conversation, and a change to one part propagates into the other two. When a problem appeared in trial, all three had to agree on what the fix was before anyone cut metal.
THE PAUSE. The development then stopped for more than a year for reasons outside the project — the international situation at the time — and was picked up again afterwards. That gap is worth stating plainly rather than editing out of the story. Tooling programmes are not immune to the world around them, and a buyer who is told a tooling schedule should know that the schedule assumes nothing interrupts it.
THREE MONTHS TO CUT, FIVE MONTHS TO FINISH. Once the work resumed, the complete set of three moulds was finished in three months. That is the number people expect to hear, and it is the smaller half of the truth. What followed was trial shots — and trials find things. Where a trial showed something had to change, the mould itself was modified and shot again. Then the zinc-alloy and stamped-steel components went through polishing, grinding, electroplating and assembly.
From first trial to a tool that could be trusted to run took **five months in total**. Not five months of waiting: five months of making a change, shooting again, and looking at what came out.
WHY ONE ANGLE DECIDES WHETHER IT WORKS. The requirement is not only that the part looks right. Every metal component has to fit every other one, and an exit device has to do a mechanical job while it does it. Get one angle wrong and the product does not work — it is not a cosmetic defect, it is a device that will not release. That is the difference between tooling a piece of hardware and tooling a piece of trim, and it is why trial-and-correction takes longer than cutting did.
WHAT THIS MEANS IF YOU ARE THE BUYER. Three things follow from this account, and they are the reason it is published rather than kept as an anecdote.
First, a tooled product and a catalogue product are two different purchases with two different clocks. If a supplier quotes the same lead time for both, one of those numbers is wrong.
Second, the tooling is where a custom exit device is either right or wrong, and it is decided months before the first production order ships. That is an argument for visiting, for asking to see trial shots, and for approving a sample rather than a drawing.
Third — and this is the part we would rather say out loud — the 311 exists because a customer brought us a sample and we spent five months on it. The moulds are ours. That means the geometry can be changed for the next customer who needs it changed, including the centre distance, which is why the 311 carries **both 72mm and 92mm cylinder centres** rather than one. A supplier who buys finished devices cannot offer that, because the mould is not theirs to alter.
Every product has a story behind it. This one took five months, three craftsmen and a phone call at eleven at night.
About Canton Hyland — Canton Hyland manufactures panic exit devices, locks and architectural door hardware for commercial and institutional projects, supplying specifiers and distributors internationally.