Rammer Brand Guidelines: The Lahti Hydraulic Hammer Brand Sandvik Brought Back

A Finnish breaker name, now inside Sandvik.

Rammer is a Finnish brand of hydraulic hammers — the breakers mounted on excavators to split rock and concrete — and of related demolition attachments. Its own website describes it as an “expert of rock breaking since 1978,” and in March 2018 the trade magazine International Mining reported that the brand was celebrating its 40th birthday that year. The magazine wrote that “the success was born in Finland,” and the company’s home has been the city of Lahti, north-east of Helsinki.

Rammer is now part of Sandvik, the Swedish engineering group. The brand’s website says so directly, and carries a copyright line in the name of Sandvik Mining and Construction Oy, the group’s Finnish company. The operating manuals published on the site name the manufacturer as Sandvik Mining and Construction Oy, Breakers Lahti, Finland — the name of the Lahti breaker operation. In the anniversary year, International Mining attended an event at the factory where Sandvik marked a production milestone, described below.

From the start, the company says, Rammer took a global approach, selling through a selected network of dealers rather than directly. Today it says its products are sold in more than 60 countries, with authorised dealers providing local support. The website lists certificates for environmental management to ISO 14001:2015 and for occupational health and safety management to ISO 45001:2018.

Innovations that carried the Ram prefix.

Much of Rammer’s reputation rests on features that took its name. Writing for the 40th anniversary in 2018, International Mining listed innovations that it said had become “an integral part of the industry’s language”: Ramlube, Ramjet and Ramses. In 2012 the Indian trade magazine NBM&CW, reporting the brand’s return, named three of the developments behind them: an on-board service indicator that gives information to the user and stores data for the owner and dealer, an automatic lubrication system developed specifically for hydraulic hammers, and a remote monitoring analyser that reads condition and performance data from the hammer’s hydraulic system.

The same idea of remote data has run through later products. For the 40th anniversary Sandvik updated the Excellence Line of Rammer hammers and introduced the RD3 remote monitoring device, which it described as the first of its kind on hammers; RD3 used Sandvik’s MyFleet telematics service to show where hammers were and how they were being used. Sandvik’s announcement also listed mechanical changes in the updated line: a lower tool bushing that can be rotated and replaced in the field, two tool retaining pins, and separate greasing channels from the valve body to the upper and lower bushings. Model numbers run as four digits; International Mining described the medium range as running from the 1655 to the 2577. Today the brand pairs SAM, a digital assistant, with the RD Guard remote monitoring device, which the company says gives access to hammer performance data “anytime, anywhere.”

Hammers sit at the centre of the range, but the website also lists breaker boom systems and demolition tools. The demolition range includes grapples, multiprocessors and rotating and static pulverizers, alongside scrap shears. The company also sells its own tools, spare parts and accessories for the hammers, and describes the aftermarket as part of the offer rather than an afterthought.

Design and documentation.

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.

Withdrawn in 2007, reintroduced in 2012.

For five years the Rammer name disappeared from new products. According to NBM&CW, the brand was withdrawn in 2007, when the entire Breakers Lahti product line came under the Sandvik Mining and Construction umbrella and was sold under the Sandvik name. In 2012 Sandvik brought it back. The magazine reported that a new Construction business area, effective from 1 January 2012, gave Sandvik the chance to use a multi-brand strategy, and quoted the company’s vice president for breakers at a relaunch event in Mumbai: “For more than 30 years Rammer enjoyed a level of brand loyalty that is virtually unique in the field of construction equipment.”

The relaunch split the market. Rammer-branded hammers and attachments went back to dealers serving construction, demolition and quarrying customers, while mining and large-quarry customers, and those buying breakers as part of a Sandvik turnkey package, stayed with Sandvik-branded products sold mainly through direct channels, the magazine reported.

The anniversary in 2018 showed the brand’s other business, fixed breaker booms. On 1 March that year, International Mining reported, Sandvik handed over the 3,000th pedestal-mounted boom at the factory, an M550 boom fitted with a Rammer 2577 hammer, sold through the South African dealer Hydraulic Hammers to Gold Fields’ South Deep mine. The magazine noted that the boom maker Rambooms had been a strategic partner of Sandvik Mining and Construction for decades.

The same article described Rammer’s “familiar red and white livery.”

For a design guide, Rammer shows how a product name with strong dealer loyalty can survive being folded into a parent brand and return. Compare Sandvik, its owner, and Indeco, the Bari hammer maker. For this guide we use a deep red, a frost white and a granite grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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