Kautex Maschinenbau's Open House events are always an exciting glimpse into the company's future, but this year's event focused equally on where the business has come from, celebrating its 80th anniversary alongside the festivities.
Kautex
Around 150 customers from 30 countries travelled from around the world to Kautex Maschinenbau headquarters in Bonn. Over the course of two days, the manufacturer of extrusion blow moulding machines presented many new developments, techniques and trends from the business fields of packaging, automotive and special applications.
Things kicked off on the first day with topics for the packaging industry. In expert talks given by internal and external speakers, topics presented included developments on a new electric canister machine and the possibilities offered by the microcellular foaming technique. The following day covered special applications and topics from the automotive sector. Kautex experts provided information about the manufacture of composite pressure vessels and the development of a new suction blow moulding machine for manufacturing 3D-shaped engine parts.
To mark the 80th anniversary of the Kautex brand, a company chronicle was created and artefacts and milestones from company history were brought together to form an exhibition. This included the world’s first commercially used blow moulding machine from 1949, which is still fully functional today. To prove this, this vintage technology was used to produce a retro-style bottle from the 1950s for the international visitors.
In addition to the talks, visitors who had travelled from all over Europe, Africa, Asia and the US were able to experience a total of 23 machines in production use. The first virtual machine, developed by Kautex for training purposes, was presented to the visitors.