MAIT Brand Guidelines: Osimo Piling Rigs and Crawler Cranes, Drilling Machines Since 1952

A drilling-machine maker on the Adriatic side.

MAIT is a maker of drilling rigs and foundation machinery at Osimo, in the province of Ancona in the Marche, on Italy’s Adriatic side. The company, MAIT S.p.A., says on its website that it has built drilling machines since 1952 and has more than 70 years of experience in the field. The Dutch enthusiast site trucks-cranes.nl, on a page illustrated with its own photographs from 2019, likewise describes MAIT as an Italian manufacturer of foundation rigs and cranes, based in Osimo and founded in 1952.

The company describes a two-part sales model. In Italy, it says, MAIT produces and sells directly; abroad, sales are handled by companies belonging to its own group, with several branch offices and stocks of spare parts and consumables kept in each area. It says it can provide technical help and spare parts within 24 to 48 hours of a customer’s call, depending on the region, and it also offers drilling rigs and accessories for hire and lists used machines for sale.

MAIT shows its machines at the international construction fairs. Its website lists appearances at Samoter in Verona in 2014, at bauma in Munich in 2016 and 2022, at Conexpo in Las Vegas in 2017 and at Intermat in Paris in 2024, along with trade shows in Moscow, China and India and the Geofluid show in Piacenza in 2016. trucks-cranes.nl recorded the company at bauma in 2019 as well.

From the HR 420-800 to the Baby Drill.

MAIT’s catalogue is organised by foundation technique. Its website lists rigs for bored piles, led by the HR series and including compact machines such as the Baby Drill, the Midi Drill and the Rail Drill; continuous flight auger rigs; versions for diaphragm walls and for driven piles; geothermal rigs; micropile rigs in the GEA and MDT series; hydraulic hammers; and a range of crawler cranes. It also offers low-headroom rigs mounted on excavators for sites with restricted access, and says its micropile range has recently gained 14 new models.

The largest machine is the HR 420-800, which the company calls its biggest model, designed for drilling large diameters to great depths. MAIT says the rig can carry rotary heads of different torque, including its own MAIT Casing System, and that it is not limited to conventional kelly drilling: it can also work with casing oscillators, continuous flight augers, diaphragm-wall tools and hydraulic hammers for driven piles, and that it is also available with a pull-down winch that gives the rotary head a longer stroke along the mast, so longer casing sections can be used. trucks-cranes.nl recorded MAIT showing an HR 420-800 DH at bauma 2019 in Munich, which it described as the biggest rig the company produced, weighing around 165 tonnes as erected and fitted with two rotary heads, one driving the outer tube and one the inner.

Not every MAIT machine drills. The CRANE models are hydraulic lattice-boom crawler cranes, which the company describes as suited to foundation sites for lifting reinforcement cages and tremie pipes into place. The BABUIN 450 is a soil-stabilisation machine for the lime-and-cement method; MAIT says it uses a patented system, the MAIT Floating System, which lets its cutter level itself on uneven ground, such as country roads, without electronic equipment. Driven-pile versions carry the THH code, among them the THH 6 and THH 9. The GEA 500 is a compact crawler rig for small-diameter drilling, with a boom that the company says can move through 360 degrees.

Piling rigs and documentation.

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.

Made in-house, by its own account.

MAIT makes a strong manufacturing claim. Its website says it buys in only commercial components, such as pumps, engines, valves and adapters, while the rest of each machine is produced inside the company, in a process that runs from raw materials to the finished product. It says the machine tools it uses are almost all computer-controlled, that it welds by the MIG/MAG method, and that visitors can see the whole production process. It also says it has been certified to ISO 9001 by RINA, the Italian certification body, for many years. These are the company’s own statements.

The website goes further, describing MAIT as the only company in its sector able to offer a product entirely conceived, designed and built for specific applications, and saying its machines work on thousands of building sites around the world. Both are the company’s claims.

The brand presents itself through its machines. The company writes its name in capitals, MAIT, and names most of its products with letter codes and numbers — HR, GEA, MDT, THH — with the occasional word name, such as the Babuin. Its catalogue runs from compact rigs for tight urban sites to the large HR 420-800, with cranes and soil-stabilisation machines alongside the drills.

For a design guide, MAIT shows how a long-running regional engineering firm can build a brand from a plain name in capitals and a catalogue of coded machines. Compare Soilmec, another Italian maker of foundation drilling rigs, and Casagrande, which also builds piling rigs in Italy. For this guide we use a foundry red, a steel grey and a stone white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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