Power Tool Manufacturing: Drills to ABB Robots

Power tool manufacturing turns motors, gears, plastic housings and battery packs into drills and drivers that have to survive years of rough use on building sites and in garages. This post starts with the first electric drills of the 1880s and 1890s and the pistol grip drill Black & Decker patented in 1917, then follows the move to cordless tools. After that it covers the present, with Stanley Black & Decker closing an old Maryland plant while promising a billion dollars for US manufacturing, and the places in assembly and testing where ABB robots such as YuMi, GoFa and the IRB 930 fit.

Franz-Josef Sehr uses a Black & Decker hammer drill to hang a painting, August 1986. Photo: Nassauer27 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From the Fein drill to Black & Decker's pistol grip

The electric drill followed the electric motor quickly. In 1889 Arthur James Arnot and William Blanch Brain, mining engineers in Melbourne, patented an electric drill. Six years later, in 1895, the brothers Wilhelm and Carl Fein of Stuttgart built the first portable handheld electric drill. A replica in the Technoseum in Mannheim shows a bulky metal body with the motor behind the chuck and wooden handles to hold it. Machines like this were for workshops and industry, and for a long time most people who needed a hole at home still used a hand brace.

A replica of the first handheld electric drill, made by C. and E. Fein in Stuttgart in 1895, at the Technoseum in Mannheim. Photo: Torana / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Black & Decker made the drill something one hand could control. S. Duncan Black and Alonzo G. Decker founded the company in Baltimore in 1910 as a small machine shop. In 1917 they patented a handheld electric drill with a pistol grip and a trigger switch, the layout nearly every drill still has, and opened their first factory in Towson, Maryland, the same year. Sales reached one million dollars by 1919. Tools of that era were built by hand at benches, where workers fitted armatures into housings, pressed in bearings, greased gearboxes and tightened each screw themselves.

Former piano workers in Chicago assemble aircraft motor parts with an electric screwdriver, July 1942. Photo: Ann Rosener / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Plants grew over the following decades. Black & Decker's factory in Hampstead, Maryland, employed about 3,800 people by the late 1960s. The company also developed cordless tools and contributed to NASA's Gemini and Apollo programmes, which later earned it a place in the Space Foundation's Space Technology Hall of Fame. Going cordless changed the factory too, because every tool now came with a battery pack and a charger. For a long time assembly stayed mostly manual, with powered screwdrivers, presses and test benches helping the workers.

A cordless drill with a 14.4 volt slide on battery pack, the design that put a battery in every tool. Photo: Tool Dude8mm / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robots on today's drill and battery lines

Power tool makers are still reshaping their plants. In August 2026 Stanley Black & Decker filed notice that it will close the Hampstead site, with 55 jobs cut in stages between 23 October 2026 and 26 March 2027. Power tool production there ended by 1985, and since then the site has worked mainly as a distribution centre with a small powdered metal operation. The same month the company said it would invest $1 billion in the United States through 2028, about half on research and development of tools for trades professionals and half on capital spending to strengthen its US manufacturing footprint.

A Black and Decker Matrix 20 volt lithium cordless drill, 2017. Photo: Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

In a modern power tool plant, robots take the jobs that need the same force and placement every time. Motor production is one, covered in our post on electric motor manufacturing. Gearbox and housing assembly involve many small screws. ABB has used its own dual arm YuMi IRB 14000 with a smart screwdriver to remove and fit screws in its drives business, as described in our post on screwdriving robot cells, and the GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can drive screws or press parts next to workers on the same bench.

ABB's dual arm YuMi IRB 14000, the robot ABB used for its own screwdriving cell, here working beside a lab technician. Photo: ABB

Battery packs are the other big job. Cells have to be sorted, held in a frame, welded to nickel strips and wired to a management board, and every step needs careful handling. ABB's IRB 930 SCARA robot, launched in 2023, is aimed at electronics and battery assembly, and ABB runs its own robot cells for battery modules at its plant in Baden, Switzerland. A power tool maker could use similar cells for 18 volt packs. No ABB project with a power tool brand has been reported, so for now this is a possibility.

A worker loads a fixture at a fenced robot cell in ABB's battery module plant in Baden, Switzerland. Photo: ABB

Where robotic power tool manufacturing goes next

Testing is a good candidate for more automation. Each tool should be run up and checked for current draw, noise, vibration and trigger behaviour, and many get a short run-in. NIOSH researchers have measured the noise of drills mounted on fixed rigs, and a robot could load tools into rigs like these, press the trigger through a set pattern and sort the results. Engineers usually build and test programs like this first in RobotStudio, where they can check reach and cycle time before the cell goes onto the floor.

A Black and Decker drill mounted on a test rig and drilling into wood during NIOSH noise measurements. Photo: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Cost and product variety slow things down. A brand may sell dozens of tools on one battery platform, each with its own housing and gearbox, and product lines change every year or two. Fixed automation copes badly with that, so flexible cobots and robots that can be reprogrammed quickly, for example with ABB's Wizard easy programming, suit these lines better. When a company closes old sites and reworks its plant network, as Stanley Black & Decker is doing, equipment that can be moved and taught again in a new building is easier to justify.

An engineer with an ABB IRB 930 SCARA robot, launched in 2023 for electronics and battery assembly. Photo: ABB

People remain part of the picture. Stanley Black & Decker's plan puts half its spending on tools for tradespeople, while the factory half has to make those tools at a competitive cost. Robots can take over screwdriving, pack welding and test handling, but someone still has to set up the cells, clear faults and check quality. On the factory floor the jobs that grow are likely to be programming and maintaining robots, while fewer people spend their shifts turning screws by hand.

A Panasonic 18 volt cordless drill driver with its battery pack at a Panasonic showroom in Ottobrunn, 2025. Photo: Matti Blume / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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