Montabert Brand Guidelines: The Lyon Rock-Breaker Maker of Saint-Priest, Now Part of Komatsu

Pneumatic tools first, hydraulics later.

Montabert began in Lyon in 1921. The company says that Joanès Montabert started his business there that year and began by making pneumatic equipment, the compressed-air tools of the building trade. In its own timeline the next landmark comes in 1949, when it set up a research and development department and began selling pneumatic equipment under the Montabert name.

The move into hydraulics is the part of the story the company tells most proudly. Montabert says that in 1969 it invented and sold the first hydraulic breaker with accumulator technology, that in 1970 it did the same for the hydraulic drill, or drifter, and that in 1987 it brought out the first hydraulic breaker with a variable energy system. Others date the breaker milestone differently: the Irish and British trade site Hub-4 wrote in February 2020 that Montabert invented the world’s first hydraulic concrete breaker in 1964, and a Komatsu announcement of March 2020 described Montabert as the inventor of the first all-hydraulic rock breaker. These are claims made by the company and its owners and partners rather than findings of an independent historian, and they are given here as such.

The firm’s home today is Saint-Priest, on the south-eastern edge of the Lyon conurbation. Montabert says its products are designed and made there, that its headquarters is on the same site, and that it works through a network of around 150 distributors around the world. Its French website describes the company as a pillar of Lyon’s industry and puts its workforce at about 500 people.

Breakers, drifters and drill masts.

Montabert’s catalogue falls into a few clear families. The largest family is its hydraulic breakers, the percussion hammers that mount on an excavator arm in place of a bucket and are used to break rock, concrete and road surfaces. The company’s current French catalogue runs from a compact SD series for small carriers to heavier ranges, and its timeline names two families by launch date: the Silver Clip range of 2004, compact models without tie rods and with what the company calls a floating bushing, and the XL range of 2009, entry-level hammers built around nitrogen technology.

The second family is drilling. Montabert sells hydraulic drifters under the HC name for surface and underground work, and a CPA range of drill masts that, the company says, turn an ordinary excavator into a drilling machine for blast-hole drilling, rock bolting along roadsides and similar jobs. A smaller line of pneumatic tools continues the trade the firm started with in Lyon.

When the mining-equipment maker Joy Global bought the business in 2015, KHL quoted its description of Montabert as a specialist in the design, production and distribution of hydraulic rock breakers, pneumatic equipment, drilling attachments, drifters and related parts and tools. That list still matches the four product headings on Montabert’s own website.

The breakers also travel under another name. In March 2020 Komatsu announced a full range of hydraulic breakers for North America, manufactured by Montabert and branded Komatsu in that market, designed to fit Komatsu excavators without modification. Hub-4 reported the same year that a Komatsu-branded range made at the Saint-Priest plant was being sold in Ireland, while Montabert went on selling its traditional products in what the site called their iconic green colour scheme through its long-standing dealers.

Attachments and the trade.

Excavator attachments are sold on what they let a machine do. A tiltrotator sits between the arm and the bucket so that the bucket can turn and tilt, and its makers tend to show it at work: a bucket angled along a trench in a city street, a ditch shaped beside a forest road in northern Sweden, a grab sorting stone on a building site. Hydraulic breakers are pictured against rock faces and concrete, demolition shears against steel, and quick couplers in close-up, where the meeting of tool and machine is the point of the picture.

Much of this trade began in the Nordic countries. engcon traces its tiltrotator to the mid-1980s in Jämtland, and Rototilt traces its name to a 1986 launch by Noreco of Umeå; in 2020 Rototilt and Steelwrist launched Open-S, a shared standard for fully automatic quick couplers, KHL reported. Breaker and demolition-tool makers in Italy, Finland, France, Germany and Japan complete the group of makers in these guides.

The makers meet their customers in person. Trade fairs such as bauma in Germany and Intermat in France, Conexpo in Las Vegas and national machinery shows are where new ranges are unveiled; engcon says it first showed its tiltrotator at a Stockholm fair in 1993, and Rototilt presented its Rototilt Control concept at bauma in 2022. Demonstration days, factory open houses and dealer events let operators try the equipment, and much selling goes through local dealers and sales companies.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not the brands’ marks.

Four owners in a quarter of a century.

Montabert has changed hands several times since the 1990s. The company’s timeline says the American industrial group Ingersoll Rand acquired it in 1994 and that Doosan acquired it in 2007; English Wikipedia records that in 2007 Doosan Infracore of South Korea bought Bobcat and the rest of Ingersoll Rand’s construction equipment units, and KHL later confirmed that Doosan was Montabert’s owner by the time of the next sale.

That sale came in June 2015. KHL reported on 8 June 2015 that the American mining-equipment maker Joy Global had completed its purchase of Montabert from Doosan’s French holding company at the start of the month, and quoted Joy Global’s chief executive describing the deal as a step into hard rock mining, tunnelling and rock excavation. Two years later, English Wikipedia records, Joy Global was itself acquired by Komatsu of Japan and renamed Komatsu Mining Corp.; Montabert’s timeline gives 2017 as the year Komatsu Mining Corp. acquired the company. Its French legal notice describes Montabert as a simplified joint-stock company with a single shareholder, based in Saint-Priest.

Inside the Komatsu group the brand has kept its own name, its own dealers and, according to Hub-4, its own green livery, while also building breakers that carry Komatsu’s name. Montabert says it files three to five patents a year and that its products are made in France, near Lyon, where it was founded.

For a design guide, Montabert shows how an old regional maker can keep a strong, recognisable trade identity through several owners. Compare Komatsu, its owner since 2017, and Rammer, another breaker maker. For this guide we use a deep green, a soft grey and a limestone white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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