http://onlinecoveragnews.com - ometime in early 2013, a few of the engineers at Fiskars—maker of the world’s most ubiquitous orange scissors in addition to gardening and pruning gear—noticed a discrepancy. “We always do our testing [for heavy hand tools] based on a machine cutting a branch,” says Dan Cunningham, a senior engineer at the company. Yet, “we humans are not machines. So we thought, well, how far away are we?”

The industrial machines at Fiskars test loppers, shears, and pruners, by applying a fixed, steady amount of pressure on saplings until they snap. The human arm maneuvers differently than a couple pieces of metal. We have joints, bones, and varying levels of strength. Cunningham and the engineers at Fiskars wanted to figure out how to design their tools for the latter, which is how they ended up launching the PowerGear2 line of tools.