Door Hardware Robot: From Willenhall Locks to ABB

Every front door, window latch and padlock holds a small mechanism of springs, pins and brass parts machined to fractions of a millimetre. For centuries locksmiths filed and fitted those parts by hand. Today presses and CNC machines make most of them, and robot arms take on more of the finishing and assembly. This post follows lock making from the backyard workshops of Willenhall in England to the American factories of Yale and Master Lock. It looks at what a door hardware robot does now, why a closed Milwaukee lock plant is back in the news, and where ABB grinding cells and cobots could fit into hardware production.

A pin tumbler euro cylinder fitted in a door. Photo: Willh26 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How locks were filed and fitted by hand

Willenhall, a town in the English Black Country near Wolverhampton, made locks and keys for centuries. As early as 1770 it had 148 skilled locksmiths. Lock making there began as a cottage industry, with families producing whole locks or single parts in sheds behind their houses. The Locksmith's House on New Road, now a museum, keeps one of those homes with its backyard workshops. The Hodson family lived there from 1904 and made bar padlocks. Their work meant cutting and filing levers, bending springs and fitting each lock to its key by eye and by feel.

The Locksmith's House museum on New Road, Willenhall. Photo: Brianboru100 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Precision lock making in Britain owes a lot to Joseph Bramah. He patented his lock in 1784, and from 1790 his London shop showed a challenge lock in the window with an inscription promising 200 guineas to anyone who could pick it. The prize went unclaimed until the Great Exhibition of 1851, when the American locksmith Alfred Hobbs opened it after about 51 hours of work spread over 16 days. Bramah's locks were hard to make by hand, so he relied on his young employee Henry Maudslay, and together they built machine tools that made the parts more accurately and in larger numbers.

Bramah's challenge lock and its board promising 200 guineas to whoever could pick it. Photo: Geni / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the United States, Linus Yale Jr. patented a pin tumbler lock for doors in 1863. In 1868 he and Henry Towne founded the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company in Stamford, Connecticut, to produce cylinder locks, whose small interchangeable pins suited machine production far better than handmade lever locks. Master Lock followed in Milwaukee in 1921. Its padlock, invented by Harry Soref in 1919, built a strong body cheaply from stacked layers of laminated steel. Robots arrived in metal hardware much later, and they usually got the dirty jobs: grinding, buffing and polishing parts to a bright finish.

A brass padlock with its keys, the kind of hardware made in large numbers on machines. Photo: Trougnouf / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Lock plants, polishing cells and cobots today

Master Lock closed its plant at 2600 N. 32nd Street in Milwaukee in March 2024, and about 330 union jobs went with it. The campus once employed around 1,300 people, and President Obama toured it in 2012 to promote American manufacturing. Commercial Development Company of St. Louis bought the 26 acre site in May 2025 for $2.6 million, then put it up for online auction this summer with FRE Auctions. On 28 September 2026 The Business Journals reported that bidding had closed but that a sale was far from certain.

A speaker inside Master Lock's Milwaukee plant during the 2012 presidential visit. Photo: WisPolitics.com / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In a modern lock plant, CNC machines turn and mill lock bodies and cylinders while presses stamp plates and keys. Robots tend to end up at the finishing benches. Polishing brass handles, buffing escutcheons and deburring castings is dusty, noisy and repetitive, and abrasive belts wear out the people who hold parts against them all day. A robot that holds the part against a belt or wheel keeps the pressure and angle the same from the first piece to the last, and it does not breathe the dust.

A worker grinding a casting by hand at Pratt & Letchworth, Buffalo, in 1943. Photo: Marjory Collins, Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB does not sell a dedicated lock manufacturing robot, and we found no ABB project with a lock maker. Its existing products do cover the same tasks. Large arms like the IRB 6700 already grind steel parts in cells such as Teqram's EasyGrinder at the German steel service centre Ancofer, and ABB Force Control lets a robot keep a set contact pressure while it grinds or polishes. For small parts, the dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 and the single arm YuMi IRB 14050 could insert springs and pins, much like the screwdriving cells on electronics lines.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

Where lock and hardware production goes next

The product itself is changing. More and more door locks carry keypads, fingerprint readers, motors and wireless radios, so a lock factory starts to look like an electronics assembly plant. Circuit boards, batteries and small motors have to be placed, screwed down and tested inside a metal housing. That mix of fine assembly and testing suits cobots such as the GoFa CRB 15000, which can share a bench with people and take over the repetitive steps while staff deal with exceptions and changeovers.

A smart door lock with a keypad and fingerprint reader. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Lock makers also build in many variants. One housing may come in a dozen finishes, and many cylinders are keyed to a particular building or master key system. Small batches have always made robots harder to justify, because a new part can mean new grippers and new programs. Offline programming helps: engineers can build and test a polishing path or an assembly sequence in RobotStudio before the cell stops for a changeover. On ABB's cobots, Wizard easy programming lets shop staff set up simple tasks with graphical blocks instead of code.

Programming a single arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

A polishing cell with force control, dust extraction and safety fencing costs real money, and a small hardware workshop may make only a few thousand pieces of one design. Skills are another gap, since the people who know how a good brass finish should look are rarely the people who program robots. Home owners should also remember that a robot built lock is only as secure as its design. Automation can make locks cheaper and more consistent, but keeping out a skilled picker like Hobbs depends on the engineers who design the mechanism.

An ABB GoFa cobot handling turned metal parts in a STIMA cell at METEC CNC Präzisionsteile. Photo: ABB

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