Lach Diamant celebrates 100 years - from diamond cutter to tool manufacturer

The Lach Diamant company was founded in 1922 by Jakob Lach in Hanau - as a company for cutting diamonds into jewelry diamonds or "brilliants". Later it rose to become a manufacturer of tools and now celebrated its 100th anniversary.

At the end of the 1930s, Lach Diamant employed up to 600 people in cutting diamonds. The turmoil of war and then the strong DM brought the cutting of diamonds into brilliants to a standstill in Germany until the mid-1950s - as it was too expensive for foreign clients. Then came the break under the motto "Diamonds are not only a girl`s best friend!": From the "white" jewelry stone to the brownish and yellow diamond - the not so clean octahedron-shaped industrial diamond. The business purpose had changed.

At the age of 61, Jakob Lach, born in 1894, accepted the challenge of exploring a new line of business. At the beginning, he was still alone with a suitcase full of diamonds - divided, sorted by price qualities and different weights (in carats - 1 carat = 0.2 grams). The customers were mostly in Schweinfurt, like Kugelfischer, or in Stuttgart Bosch and SKF. Jakob Lach received support on October 1, 1960, when his son Horst, a newly qualified industrial clerk, joined the company.

Twenty years later, Jakob Lach, now 86 years old, was to make this statement in a video film at the presentation of Lach Diamant on the technology developed for the first time "Diamond - polycrystalline diamond tools for superior machining of wood and composite materials in the furniture, flooring, plastics industry": "When I took a diamond in my hand for the first time in my life in 1908, I would never have dreamed that one day diamond could be used as a cutting material not only in the automotive industry but also for machining wood and plastics."

From trading in industrial diamonds, Lach Diamant had in the meantime developed into a reliable player as a manufacturer of diamond dressing tools, diamond turning tools for overturning copper collectors in the electrical industry, resin bonded diamond and CBN (Borazon) grinding wheels, PCD cutting tools for aluminum, fiberglass (GRP) and plastic fiber (CFRP) machining. The number of patents filed to date demonstrate the pioneering spirit and uniqueness that made the company a world leader in many areas of newly applied manufacturing processes.

The know-how thus acquired also led to the granting of licenses - for example in countries such as Japan and Israel. If one asks about the source of all these corporate successes, one will hear Horst Lach say: "It all started with the synthetic diamond. In 1957, this was offered for the first time by an American manufacturer as a so-called "man-made diamond" in grit form as an abrasive for the production of diamond grinding wheels. That fascinated me, especially since I was sort of born into my father's company's transition from jewelry diamond to industrial diamond."

Synthetic diamonds were followed in 1969 by grits with cubic boron nitride (CBN) under the name "Borazon"; Lach Diamant turned this into the first CBN grinding wheel for grinding HSS tools. This was followed in 1973 by the first new diamond-containing cutting material - polycrystalline synthetic diamond (PCD), and in 1974 came the polycrystalline boron nitride insert - for overturning high-alloy hardened steels. All these new superabrasive materials spurred the development of Lach Diamant. The invention of spark/electrical discharge machining was groundbreaking and still leads to today's goals. It finally made possible the subsequent push of NC/CNC technology in the machine tool industry and thus in series production.

The now possible economical production of polycrystalline diamond tools for machining not only wood and plastics, but also in the automotive and accessories industry. The now possible installation of weight-saving light materials in vehicles, airplanes and finally the today much quoted development of wind power plants, which Lach Diamant can also proudly claim, created early on new energy boosts with simultaneous climate friendliness.

The list of all achievements adopted by the industry to date from the creation of now 100 years Lach Diamant could fill a broad "who is who" of technology. At the trade fairs of 2022 - such as GrindingHub and AMB in Stuttgart - the company showed under the slogan "Tradition - Passion - Innovation" that it is still ready to meet today's and tomorrow's challenges in the service of the industry and thus to manifest itself as a reliable partner.

With the academic anniversary celebration on October 13, 2022 in the German Goldsmith House in Hanau, an extensive exhibition was opened in these rooms at the same time for all those who always wanted to know what is successfully done with diamond today. (OM-1/23)