Klemm Bohrtechnik Brand Guidelines: The 1963 Drilling Firm That Became BAUER’s Anchor-Rig Maker

A contracting firm that began making its own tools.

Klemm Bohrtechnik — written KLEMM Bohrtechnik GmbH in the company’s own releases — was founded in 1963 by Günter Klemm. According to a company history published by its parent, the BAUER Group, in October 2023 and carried the same month by the Spanish trade journal Interempresas, he set it up to carry out drilling and blasting work that extracted stone for dam construction. In its early years the firm drilled blast holes in quarries and on road projects and drilled injection holes to seal dams.

It soon made pieces of its own equipment, such as drill bits and drill strings. The business moved towards overburden drilling, a method used in specialist foundation work to tie back the sides of excavation pits. In 1967, the company says, Günter Klemm devised an overburden device that combined a down-the-hole hammer with a rotary percussive casing system and joined the flushing head to an excavating head, to clear drilling debris better.

The shift from contractor to manufacturer was gradual. The company points to construction drawings from 1970 as evidence of how far it had moved, and says it gave up its own drilling operations entirely in 1972, the year it presented its first hydraulic drilling hammer. From then on, its main business was selling drill strings, drilling accessories and flushing heads, and then the machines to carry them.

Hammers, double heads and the KR rigs.

Through the 1970s the firm developed what became its signature: double-head systems that pair a hydraulic hammer on the inner drill string with a rotary drive on the outer casing. The company history names the S30 hydraulic hammer with rotary drive and the KB 40-B and KB 40-O systems of that decade, and dates to 1974 the KR 800, a crawler drilling rig with a diesel-hydraulic drive and a movable drilling carriage. The “KR” prefix still runs through its range. It also registered patents in the 1970s, including one on frequency control of the impact piston, the company says.

The 1980s brought quarry rigs such as the KR 901 and KR 1001, the first KR 806 with a double head and a hydraulic hammer, Kelly drilling rigs with Kelly bars, augers and buckets, and in 1983 the GH 80 pile drilling rig. In 1981, the company says, a diving bell fitted with a rotary drive was used for coring off the coast of Newfoundland, at a water depth of 160 metres, for a telephone cable.

Ownership changed twice. In 1989 Klemm was acquired by the American Ingersoll-Rand group. Building work in Berlin after German reunification brought strong demand, and in 1990 the firm began developing equipment for thermal probe drilling for geothermal energy. A downturn followed in the mid-1990s; the company says staff numbers were cut and international subsidiaries closed. In 1998 the BAUER Group of Schrobenhausen, a former competitor, bought Klemm and restructured it: Klemm stopped selling pile drilling rigs, and Bauer stopped selling anchor drilling rigs from Schrobenhausen. Bauer’s release adds that Karlheinz Bauer had already shown interest in acquiring the company in the 1970s.

Rigs for anchors, piles and boreholes.

Piling and foundation rig makers sell machines that do most of their work out of sight, below ground, so their pictures tend to show what stands above it. The common image is a tall mast rising over a building site, often framed against a city skyline or a half-finished bridge, with the rig itself on crawler tracks in mud, gravel or sand. The height of the mast gives the photograph its shape, and the model code painted on it is often the largest lettering in the frame.

A second set of images is about tools. Augers, drilling buckets, casings, grabs and cutter wheels are laid out in rows or shown close up, clean and freshly painted, so that the parts that will disappear into the ground can be seen at all. Vibratory hammers, clamps and power packs are photographed the same way, as objects on their own, before they are lifted by a crane.

Trade fairs matter in this category. The bauma show in Munich is where makers stage large stands, with rigs raised to full height under the hall roof or on the open-air grounds, and where new models, electric versions and anniversaries are announced. Stand design, banners and the colour of the machines themselves are part of how a maker is recognised there.

Many of these companies also carry a family or founder’s name, or grew out of a contractor’s own workshop, and their histories are told through dates, places and model numbers rather than slogans. For this series we look at how each maker presents that history, using an unofficial palette and a stand-in typeface, and reproducing no machine, logo or nameplate.

The BAUER Group’s anchor-drilling specialist.

Since 1998 Klemm has been, in the BAUER Group’s words, its specialist for the development and manufacture of anchor drilling rigs and accessories, based at Drolshagen in Germany. The company says that in 2004 it delivered four large automated blast hole rigs for the expansion of the Panama Canal, assembled on a floating drilling platform, and that it began work on vibratory drives in 2005, testing its first linear vibratory drive on site in 2007. It adds that a Klemm rig was later used at Ground Zero in New York, and that in 2007 a KR 709-1C was sent to China to work on a site where coal fires burned close to the surface, after which three more machines were ordered. The anchor rigs are used, the company says, for foundation and retaining work, for roads and railways above and below ground, for sealing dams and for geothermal boreholes.

Some of its newer machines carry electric drives. The battery-electric KR 806-3E, an electrohydraulic version of the diesel KR 806-3GS, was presented in 2022. In December 2023 Heavy Equipment Guide reported that Bauer had put a KR 806-3E to work for the first time on the expansion of the A9 motorway at Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, where about 12,000 anchor piles were being drilled to an average depth of 33 metres; the rig could run on its battery or from a grid connection. At bauma 2025 in Munich, Klemm showed the KR 806-4E, a further development with a larger battery, along with the KR 806-4GM and the KR 717-3GW geothermal drilling rig, according to BAUER Maschinen.

The name has stayed on the machines through two changes of ownership. Bauer’s 2023 release marked both anniversaries at once — 60 years since the founding and 25 years inside the group — and the rigs are still presented under the Klemm name, as the bauma 2025 release shows.

For a design guide, Klemm Bohrtechnik shows how a founder’s name can survive two takeovers as a specialist brand inside a larger group. Compare ABI, another German rig maker, and Liebherr, another maker of foundation equipment. For this guide we use graphite, a drill-steel blue and ochre with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Klemm Bohrtechnik’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.