The challenge: A market tendency to install standard doors in less heavily frequented areas of public/commercial buildings has become discernible in recent years.
There has been a simultaneous shift towards fitting such standard doors with Class 3 user category furniture in which lever handles are permanently connected to their rose or backplate, a choice in many cases purely and simply designed to make up for huge manufacturing tolerances in such furniture. The use of furniture of this type most definitely has a negative, delaying impact on the assembly routine at any rate.
Practice hitherto
There is fundamentally a case for employing such lever-handle assemblies in that the axial forces exerted at the door are more effectively absorbed by the door leaf. From a sustainability point of view, this property is to be welcomed.
One drawback of such hardware solutions is that the permanent connection between handle and rose comes at the expense of ease of assembly, since it is always necessary to “screw past” the handle or, in the case of a lever handle design in which the covering rose cannot be pulled over the handle, the process is rendered even more awkward by the rose. This drawback has simply been ignored by many fellow competitors, who as often as not proudly proclaim the incorporation of such lever-handle assemblies into Class 3 hardware as well. FSB was accordingly intent on finding a solution that did adequate justice to both aspects.
Our solution
It was the rejigging of our entire bearing philosophy that set us on course to solve the problem. The new product properties, a raft of niche features and a wealth of rigorously conceived functions that have been factored into the second-generation AGL® bearing made FSB realise that the handle-on-rose upgrade to the FSB standard bearing nevertheless also needed to embody the objective of improving the assembly process and that it would constitute yet another single-minded step towards embracing changing requirements in the public project sector.
The conceptual foundations for our new solution were laid by no lesser a person than our inhouse designer Hartmut Weise, who was wondering why it shouldn’t be possible to create handle-on-rose units when actually fitting the furniture to the door. Hartmut Weise first went about modifying the connection between handle and baserose in such a way that simply inserting the handle causes it to click tight in the ready-fitted base. The requisite flexibility was achieved by means of eight slots in the area of the bearing. The complete sub-unit was then secured by straightforwardly clipping on the cover roses in the long-familiar FSB manner.
All that really needs to be added here are the words of former Braun AG head designer Dieter Rams:
“Straightforward is (simply) better than complicated.”