Design Issues of Innovative Furniture Fasteners for Wood-based Boards

A methodical approach to designing new furniture fasteners for lignocellulosic materials will uncover new sources of innovation. This paper presents an example of such a design procedure and its results. The outcomes are new concepts of mechanical fasteners for wood-based boards used in frameless furniture. At first, the requirements based on the furniture users, furniture manufacturers, and fastener manufacturers viewpoints were identified. These design criteria were analyzed, and as a result, seven ideas of fasteners with innovative features were created. The invented fasteners provided a starting point to generate prototypes. The prototypes were subjected to multi-dimensional methodical developed evaluations. The purpose of this paper is a detailed presentation of the pathway leading to solutions that are potentially beneficial in terms of product performance and of the identified design limitations. Two main conclusions were made. First, all mechanical furniture fasteners always are a combination of two functional subsystems, anchoring and drive. Secondly, there are a limited number of their design solutions. Despite the wide variety of market offerings, only four anchoring methods are used, and only two drive methods are used in all fasteners.