About Richard Ira Farrington

Richard Ira Farrington brings 35 years 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 knack for details have benefitted such well-known companies as Playskool, Coleco and Black & Decker as he has managed product design from concept to production. His creative solutions are represented by more than 14 patents.

Mr. Farrington is currently Engineering Manager and owner of Foundation Design, offering freelance mechanical design services.

Before this, as Senior Design Engineer of Risdon International, Inc., a cosmetics packaging company, Mr. Farrington created design solutions earning customer confidence and resulting in more than $150,000 in new business over 18 months. 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, Mr. Farrington 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%. Mr. Farrington 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.

Before Spectrum Plastics, Mr. Farrington 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, Mr. Farrington 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. He also invented mechanisms to fit within the shape constraints required by sculpted toy designs.

Mr. Farrington 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, for the first time ever, utilized a single ultrasonic weld joint to hermetically seal three parts together.

Mr. Farrington is a Certified SolidWorks Professional. He has also excelled in the use of CADAM, Catia, and CadKey.

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