Sustainability
Ever googled the word “sustainability”? The search engine spits out more than 80 million hits in a fraction of a second. Politicians love to use the word in their speeches – preferably when on the campaign trail and after environmental catastrophes. And this is the exact word that popped into my head when I looked at our FL325 face grinding machine on our production floor a couple of days ago.

Real Sustainability
The FL 325 is a face grinding machine we built from 1955 to 2004. We shipped around 700 of these machines to our customers. With an x-axis travel range of 325 mm and the ability to finely adjust the mechanical y and z axes, our production facility in Trossingen – and many of our customers – still like to use this gem for delicate adjustment jobs. To me, this is an example of real sustainability – a machine that’s been in use for almost 50 years, with no end in sight.

And this example also fits quite well with Wikipedia’s definition of sustainability: a combination of “sustain,” which comes from the Latin sustinere, meaning to “maintain,” “support,” or “endure,” and the suffix “ability.” Put together, it simply means “the capacity to endure,” or in plain English, “the ability to last.” So a house made of stone that stands the test of time is sustainable, a house made of cardboard that gets blown away every year is not. 

Adelbert Haas firmly believed that machines had to be easy to use, extremely precise, and, above all, have the ability to last. And I’m reminded of this every time I walk by the FL 325.

Until then
Thomas Bader