Used Reishauer Machines We Buy

Who Makes Reishauer Gear Grinders

Reishauer gear grinders come from Reishauer AG, a Swiss builder with its headquarters in Wallisellen, near Zurich. The company traces itself to 1788, when the Zurich toolsmith Hans Jakob Däniker laid its foundation, and his son-in-law Gottfried Reishauer took over the workshop in 1824. Before it built machines the firm made tools, thread-cutting tools among them; in 1928 its first home-built machine, a thread grinder called the RK, went to work in its own factory.

Wallisellen is where Reishauer does its research and development and builds its machines, diamond tools and workholding, and Reishauer says all core components are developed in-house and made in its Swiss factories. It reports a 100% export share for its products, and it says the majority of hard-finished gears worldwide are ground on Reishauer machines.

The Reishauer Method and the ZA of 1945

Reishauer's engineers spent 15 years developing a faster, more accurate way to grind gears than one tooth gap at a time, and in 1945 the ZA, the first continuous generating gear grinder, went into operation. The process is still often called the Reishauer Method.

It works like a worm drive. A dressable, vitrified grinding worm, which Reishauer calls a threaded wheel, meshes with the gear and finishes it in a few continuous passes, while diamond dressing tools mounted in the machine keep the wheel's profile accurate. Reishauer points to this hard-finishing process for case-hardened gears.

Reishauer Machines by Year

Machines and milestones from Reishauer's own history page, which runs to 2024, in the order Reishauer introduced them:

Names are written as Reishauer's history writes them. Reishauer's list stops with its 2024 loader systems; the RZ 410 4.0, RZ 550 and RZ 1000 universal machines and the RS 300 hard skiving machine are on its current machine pages.

Twin-Spindle Automotive Machines and Universal Job-Shop Machines

On the automotive side, the RZ x60 4.0 machines keep Reishauer's twin-spindle layout: while one gear is ground, the finished one is unloaded and the next is loaded and meshed. Reishauer says operators who know the RZ 60 4.0 and RZ 160 4.0 can run the RZ 260 4.0, which takes car-transmission gears and gears for medium-sized trucks from 0 to 260 mm in diameter and from module 0.5 to 5. The catalog also lists the RZ 126 4.0.

The universal machines serve job shops. The RZ 410 4.0 grinds gears from 5 to 410 mm in diameter at module 0.5 to 10, and Reishauer calls it technologically identical to the RZ 550 and RZ 1000, which differ mainly in the diameters they take; the RZ 1000 reaches 1000 mm. The line goes back to the RZ 400 of 2001, which was designed for the automotive industry but found its home in job shops.

What Decides the Offer on a Used Reishauer

On a used Reishauer, the model and its control era come first. Reishauer moved wheel-to-gear synchronization from gears to electronics with the RZ300E in 1977, gave the RZ 400 a Windows user interface for gear data in 2001, and since 2020 has built its RZ x60 4.0 machines around the RSP platform, which runs RZControl on the machine and RZDesk for offline programming. Tell us which of those your machine has.

Then come capacity and options: the largest gear diameter and module it takes, whether it is a twin-spindle automotive machine or a universal one, which dressing unit and dressing tools come with it, whether profile grinding or on-board gear measuring is fitted, and whether a part loader is attached.

Older Reishauer Machines We See

Much of what reaches us under the Reishauer name is older: AZA, NZA, OZA and AZO gear grinders, RZ362A machines, AM gear grinders and NRK thread grinders. Reishauer's own history places the AZA in 1968 and the RZ362A, its first high-performance machine for the automotive industry, in 1993. Its machine building began with thread grinders, so a Reishauer thread grinder belongs to the same maker's line. The model plate and any manuals or service papers help us identify an older machine.

Reishauer Corporation Service, or Selling Outright

In North America, Reishauer's own company is Reishauer Corporation, set up in 1981 in Elgin, Illinois, and responsible for the USA, Mexico and Canada. It lists 26 staff, 14 of them field service engineers, supplies new machines, tooling, spare parts and repairs, and stocks critical spares such as grinding spindles, work spindles and ball screws for the installed base. That is where to go to keep a Reishauer in production. When a grinder has outlived its job in your plant, we will make an offer on it, and service records from Elgin help us price it.