WAHL Hair Clipper — Production Planning

Co-author within a 4-person team (Santiago Abásolo, Julieta González, Valentina Rodríguez, Sebastián Varela) · EUCD/FADU/UdelaR · 2020

Project developed during the strict COVID-19 lockdown (first semester of 2020). The brief required starting from an existing consumer appliance, reverse-engineering it, and producing all the documentation needed for its manufacture: company hypothesis, production plan, exploded view with BOM, production flow, assembly sheets per subassembly, 3-level packaging sheets, and an end-user assembly manual.

We chose the WAHL Clipper U-Clip "Men's Method", a professional hair clipper — pet category — with a 16 W motor and 7,200 RPM. We hypothesized that fabrication would happen at the Wahl Clipper Corporation Argentina subsidiary (Buenos Aires, founded 2001), part of the brand's global network with headquarters in Sterling, Illinois.

The final deliverable: a 47-page dossier + 6 separate technical sheets with detailed drawings of the key plastic components.

Wahl Clipper Corporation is a US company founded in 1919 (HQ: Sterling, Illinois). ~1,500 employees, presence in roughly 165 countries.

Wahl Argentina started operations in July 2001 as the first Wahl Clipper Corporation subsidiary in Latin America. It originally operated in Buenos Aires under a marketing-and-sales profile, and from August 2005 added local manufacturing.

For the exercise we assumed the Argentine subsidiary had the productive capacity to take on the assembly and packaging of the U-Clip model.

Technical sheet

Product sheet (original document, in Spanish) — general views + technical data + accessories.

Cutaway render showing motor, coil and blade mechanism layout inside the blue housing.

Gantt chart

10 months split into five activity blocks:

Full Gantt chart (original document, in Spanish) — month 1 through month 10.

Exploded view and bill of materials

Artistic exploded view.

Technical sheet with normalized exploded view + BOM + supplies table (original document, in Spanish).

Production flow

Production-flow tree (original document, in Spanish) — full subassembly sequence from raw inputs to finished product, with timings and operations.

Assembly sheet (example)

Every subassembly has its own sheet with description, code, quantity and step-by-step instructions:

Assembly sheet for subassembly 6 (original document, in Spanish) — cable + plates + screw, with positioning, screwing and clip-fitting instructions.

General views

General views of the complete product (side, front, top, bottom, rear) (original document, in Spanish). Scale 1:3, dimensions in mm. Roughly 234 × 60 × 65 mm overall.

Individual components

Coil

Views and sections of the coil (original document, in Spanish) — core of the motor.

Cut-length adjustment lever

General views of the lever (rev C) (original document, in Spanish) — regulates cut length from 1 to 3.5 mm.

Housing

Section of the main housing (original document, in Spanish) — shows internal seating for motor and head.

Head

Views of the head (original document, in Spanish) — the part that holds the blade and slides with the adjustment lever.

• Structured reverse engineering — taking apart a real commercial product and reconstructing its full production documentation forces you to understand why every part is where it is.
• Normalized technical communication — first project where I applied technical drawing with formal title blocks (document type, status, approver, scale, sheet N/Total). It became my standard for everything that followed.
• Thinking in production flow, not just product — a BOM isn't enough if you don't understand the assembly order, how many work stations you need and how long each operation takes.
• Packaging as part of the product — the "3-level packaging sheets" (unit / display / pallet) made me realize packaging design is a technical discipline with its own rules.