Used Waldrich-Coburg Machines We Buy

How Waldrich-Coburg Began

Waldrich-Coburg grew out of a move from Siegen. In 1919 the engineer Adolf Waldrich, until then a partner in H.A. Waldrich in Siegen, came to Coburg with the engineer Emil Hardt, and in February 1920 they founded a firm called Globuswerke in a small factory with 20 employees. It started out repairing machine tools and soon built glass processing machines of its own.

In 1926 the company moved into a building in Hahnweg, still its head office, and after Hardt left it carried the name Maschinenfabrik Adolf Waldrich. Its breakthrough was a patented hydraulic drive, first shown at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1936, and after a new course set in 1955, guideway and surface grinding machines soon became the main focus of its program.

From Planers to Portal Mills

After the war, series production of planing machines rebuilt the workforce, and it peaked at 1,000 employees in 1970. Waldrich-Coburg delivered its first machine with an NC control in 1971 and its first gantry-design portal mill, to Kraftwerksunion in Mülheim, in 1973. In 1975 came its first portal mill with a 5,000 mm table width and an 18,000 mm clamping length, the step the company says committed it to being a heavy equipment manufacturer.

The Owners Since 1986, and the WaldrichSiegen Link

Otto Waldrich sold the company to the American Ingersoll Group in 1986. Under Ingersoll, Coburg widened its range: it developed vertical turning machines, added the ValuTec and MultiTec milling products, and installed its first horizontal milling machine in 1999. When Ingersoll, of Rockford, Illinois, filed for insolvency in 2004, the Herkules Group bought Waldrich Coburg and Waldrich Siegen at auction as a package. In 2005 Beijing No.1 acquired Waldrich Coburg, and WALDRICH COBURG Services GmbH was founded in 2006.

WaldrichSiegen, which has its own page on this site, was the other half of that package. A Coburg plate and a Siegen plate are two different makers to us, so tell us which town the plate names.

Waldrich-Coburg Milestones

Dates from Waldrich-Coburg's own history page, which runs to 2021:

Waldrich-Coburg's Lines Today

Waldrich-Coburg builds large portal mills, vertical turning machines and grinders. Its TAURUS standard series arrived in 2015, and the TAURUS Gemini joined it in 2021 after more than 30 TAURUS machines had sold. Its North American company also lists the MultiTec and PowerTec under horizontal milling. The table below gives each series in the maker's own words.

Waldrich-Coburg Series and What Each Is For

The current series on Waldrich-Coburg's German and North American sites, with how the maker describes each one:

Waldrich-Coburg Service in North America, or Selling

Since 2005 the maker has had its own North American company, WALDRICH COBURG NA, Inc., founded in Erie, Pennsylvania, to provide sales, service and spare parts across the US and Canada. Erie has since added a workshop for rebuilding spindles and spindle units, a parts warehouse, and a center for technical support and remote diagnostics. Engineers in Coburg have been able to reach Waldrich-Coburg machines remotely since 1986.

The maker says its documentation keeps spare parts available even for older machines, and it also moves installed machines, drawing on more than 3,000 machine tools. For a machine you are keeping, that is the right call. For one you are selling, we buy it outright, and a recent geometry check or a spindle rebuild report is worth sending with the details.

What the Waldrich-Coburg Listings Actually Are

Thirty listings sit under this facet and all thirty carry the Waldrich-Coburg nameplate. Nothing else appears. The catalog files them across seven labels: Metal Cutting 16, CNC Gantry and Portal Mills 6, Coburg-CNC Grinding Machines 4, Coburg-CNC Gantry and Portal Mills 1, CNC Vertical Machining Centers 1, CNC Boring Mills 1, and CNC Milling Machines 1. Those seven add to exactly thirty. Two of them describe the same side of the shop, because the catalog carries both a plain gantry and portal bucket and a Coburg-prefixed variant of the same label. Together, gantry and portal work comes to seven of the thirty rather than six. The Metal Cutting bucket at sixteen is a catalog umbrella rather than a machine type, so we read no machine style into those rows. Across the thirty listings there are twenty-nine distinct model strings, and the twenty-four rows recording a build year run from 1980 to 2012.

The 30-Series and the Four Grinding Listings

Seven of the thirty listings lead with 30 in the model string, which makes it the largest family on this hub. It is also the only family whose biggest bucket is grinding. Four of those seven file under Coburg-CNC Grinding Machines and the other three under Metal Cutting, and since the hub carries exactly four grinding listings in total, every grinding row here is a 30-series machine. The strings themselves are 30-10, 30-15 S 2525, 30-10 S 3640, 30-10S, 30-10s2530, 30-10 S 3030, and one listed as a bare 30. We treat that leading number as a filing key and nothing more. Two machines that share it are not the same conversation, since four of the seven sit on the grinding side and three do not. Send the full string off the data plate, spacing and trailing digits included, and we will place the machine correctly before anyone talks about condition.

The FP Machines: 17, 17S and 15S

Nine of the thirty listings lead with 17, 17S or 15S, and most of them carry an FP designation somewhere in the string. The 17 family accounts for four listings, 17S for three, and 15S for two. Two of the single-listing categories on this hub come straight out of that group: the one CNC Vertical Machining Centers row is a 17-family machine, and the one CNC Milling Machines row is a 17S. The rest of the 17 family splits into two Metal Cutting rows and one gantry and portal row, with 17S adding two more under Metal Cutting. Real strings from these rows include 17-10FP250, 17-10 FP 250, 17-10FP180NC, 17-10FP50 NC/SM, 17S-10 FP 225, 17S-10, 17S-10FP225NC, 15S-10, and 15S-10 FPF 300 NC. Note that 17-10FP250 and 17-10 FP 250 are two separate listings differing only in spacing, so send the plate exactly as it reads rather than tidying up the spacing.

MULTITEC, VALUTEC and the Gantry and Portal Side

MULTITEC covers three listings and is the family most concentrated on the large-format side. Two file under CNC Gantry and Portal Mills and the third under the Coburg-prefixed version of that label, so all three sit on the gantry and portal side. The strings are MULTITEC 2500 AP, MULTITEC 2000 AT, and a bare MULTITEC. A fourth row reads MULTITECH 3500 FT, which the catalog treats as its own token, so it sits outside that count of three and we do not fold it in. VALUTEC appears twice, once capitalized and once as Valutec. The 20-series is two rows, both reading 20-10 FP 280, the only model string appearing on two separate listings anywhere on this hub. The 16-series is also two rows, 16 GLS 25-90 and 16 GSL 25-90 / 3 m, with the letter order differing between them. The remaining one-offs read 5-FACE, 5-FACE GANTRY MILL, MILLINGHEAD, and 8V3436.

What Jason Puuri Looks At Before Making an Offer

An evaluation starts with five fields: brand, model, year, condition and control type. Photos speed it up but are not required, and a quote typically comes back in 24 to 48 hours. On this hub the year field is worth a second look: only twenty-four of the thirty listings record one, and six carry no year at all. That is why the data plate and a couple of photos beat tracing a build date through a catalog. A 1980 machine and a 2012 machine are different conversations even when they share a leading number, and this facet covers both ends of that span. Jason Puuri scopes the machine himself rather than running it through a formula, so he wants the plate, the control, and an honest description of how it sits today. If the plate is unreadable or gone, say so and we will work from photographs and any surviving service records.

Selling One Machine or Clearing the Floor

Machine Tool Exchange, an affiliate of Superior Machine Tools, is a direct buyer. Not a broker, not an auction site, not a listing service. We purchase outright: no consignment, no listing. We can arrange the pickup and have the machine moved. We can arrange rigging, disassembly, crating and heavy freight in all fifty states, because a portal machine does not leave on a forklift. Condition is not a gate. Running in production, sitting idle, or partway through a teardown all still get an offer. Worn ways, servo faults or missing tooling do not stop one. Our gantry mill sell page names Cincinnati, SNK, Zimmermann, Zayer, Correa and Fooke as the builders we commonly buy, and it covers any brand, any condition, any quantity, so a Waldrich-Coburg does not need to appear on that short list. One machine or a full facility works the same, one quote and one pickup schedule, and on a mixed floor we buy Mazak, Haas, Okuma, Doosan, DMG MORI, Toshiba and Makino too.