Chang Loon Industrial Leads Wrench Sector with Dedicated R&D

Chang Loon Industrial Co., Ltd., founded in 1978 in the central Taiwan county of Changhua, is living example of a rags-to-riches story in traditional manufacturing on the island. The firm has developed into a top-notch wrench supplier in Taiwan through incessant dedication to R & D over the years.

Having begun 32 years ago as an OEM of low-end hand tools, Chang Loon has been over the years investing resources to absorb know-how of metallurgy and honing metalworking and manufacturing skills. Realizing the importance of quality, more so than its peers even in those days, the company has built world-caliber production lines in its factory, turning out a variety of wrenches meeting international standards such as ANSI and DIN. Devoting decades of conscientious work has enabled the maker to build a solid reputation in the global market.

Chang Loon also stands out against its peers for its focus on R&D: each manager and supervisor plays active roles in every R&D decision to maximize suitability, practicality of hand tools built for users.

Unlike most rivals, Chang Loon adopts a real-world approach to refine products: newly-developed hand tools are offered to users to try and rough edges are then rounded out based on feedback. Such trial-and-error improvement continues until Chang Loon launches the product. This seemingly perfectionist process may be costly but allows the company to realistically fine-tune products.

72-Teeth Gear Wrench

Chang Loon clearly meets world-class standards, turning out ratchet wrenches out of hot drop-forged, heat treated chrome vanadium for extra durability and aesthetics. But the piece-de-resistance of such wrenches is the standard-setting 72-teeth ratchet mechanism. Some may say it is overkill but an analogy is the rotatable bezel on a watch where smaller the ratchet the more precise each click of a turn. This wrench has 72 ratchets or teeth, with each moving through five degrees when turned, enabling users to work in narrow spaces such as between fenders and cylinder blocks, or tighten fasteners, especially in spaces not allowing free reverse cranking of wrenches, in construction and plumbing work.

Realizing the 72-teeth mechanism indicates Chang Loon's precision mechanical engineering expertise, enabling extremely precise tolerance built into the ratchet. Foreign buyers obviously prefer such top-end wrench for Chang Loon leads the sector because of offering industry-leading quality.

Packaging Makes a Difference

Some believe that good products often go unnoticed in mediocre packaging. To minimize such risk and enhance overall added-value, Chang Loon takes the trouble to design refreshing packaging that maximizes visibility. One example of such savvy marketing is the blister or window box, an idea whose effectiveness has not faded with time. The transparent window can show buyers clearly the high quality of each wrench.

Besides innovative design and eye-catching packaging, Chang Loon also adopts a time-proven way to make its hand tools even more user-friendly, via color-coding. The patent-protected colored rings embedded on the heads of wrenches clearly show wrench sizes in Imperial or metric units, the ideal way to make laborious work easier especially when trying to read finely calibrated sizes is a problem. Further refinement is also seen in the thinner-walled design of the wrenches, making the product not only lighter but also readily recognizable, an ingenious form-and-function feature.

Marketing its line of easy-to-use hand tools under its own CHL brand, C.M. Chang, company chairman, underlines the importance of investing in branding, noting that even established brands tend to lose their luster, even declining into obscurity, if left without further advancing innovation.

Chang Loon's hand tools are popular in Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Canada, and the U.S., thanks to its dedicated R&D program, which clearly works for the supplier ships more ratchet wrenches than any other counterpart in Taiwan.