Lichau GmbH

The Lichau GmbH was foun­ded by Hans Lichau as Hans Lichau Stan­zerei-Tech­nik in 1973 in Wetten­berg-Launsbach.

Two years later Hans Lichau took ad­vant­age of an op­por­tun­ity to acquire a com­plete cut­ting press de­part­ment. To ac­com­pany this move, he shif­ted the loc­a­tion of his pro­duc­tion fa­cil­it­ies to Gießen. This res­ul­ted in a con­sid­er­able in­crease both in man­u­fac­tur­ing range and in cus­tom­er groups.
Due to in­creas­ing space re­quire­ments caused by an ex­pand­ing product range and a rise in the num­ber of em­ploy­ees a mod­ern op­er­a­tions build­ing with a us­able area of 2000 m² was built in the in­dus­tri­al zone of Wetten­berg-Launsbach.
Man­u­fac­tur­ing at the new loc­a­tion began in 1984.

Since 1989, the tool con­struc­tion op­er­a­tions have in­cor­por­ated, along­side the con­ven­tion­al mod­ern tool ma­chines, CNC-con­trolled wire erosion ma­chines, which have con­sid­er­ably shortened tool pro­duc­tion times while at the same time im­prov­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing pre­ci­sion. Today the com­pany pos­sesses 5 wire EDM ma­chines and 3 cav­ity sink­ing EDM ma­chines.
As a res­ult of the in­creas­ing com­plex­ity of the art­icles pro­duced, the Bruder­er cut­ting press ma­chines were up­graded, and they can now achieve a pres­sure force of 500 kN. It is now pos­sible to pro­duce cut press com­po­nents of up to 100 mm x 50 mm from sheet ma­ter­i­al with a thick­ness of up to 1.5 mm.

A fur­ther mile­stone in the his­tory of the Lichau com­pany is the pro­duc­tion of the first in­jec­tion mould­ing tool at the end of 1995. This ex­pan­sion of the product range primar­ily in­volves the in­jec­tion mould­ing of flat con­nect­ors or con­nect­ing plugs, res­ult­ing in com­plete con­nec­tion sys­tems.
This pro­cess of re­fin­ing con­nect­ing sys­tems was con­tin­ued and has also res­ul­ted in the pro­duc­tion of con­nect­or sys­tems whose con­tacts are made of sil­ver. These products are cre­ated either by at­tach­ing sil­ver riv­ets in the stam­ping pro­cess, or by weld­ing sil­ver con­tacts of pre­defined di­men­sions from sil­ver wire.

In the year 1997 the first SPS-con­trolled assembly ma­chine with 100% con­trol was implemented. All of the ne­ces­sary steps, such as cre­at­ing the pro­ject, con­struc­tion, pro­gram­ming and all of the jobs in­volving sensor sys­tems, mech­an­ics, pneu­mat­ics and elec­trics were done in house.
An as­sembly machine with an integrated ul­tra­son­ic weld­ing sys­tem was built in 2002 for producing an automotive switch element. This product consists of two stamped parts with three sil­ver rivets and a plastic part fixed by ultrasonic welding.

In 2002 the Metallgeräte Elgersburg GmbH be­comes a 100% daughter and Lichau now op­er­ates un­der a new leg­al form and the new name Lichau GmbH.

The con­struc­tion of an ad­di­tion­al pro­duc­tion build­ing was star­ted in 2005 and suc­cess­fully com­pleted in 2006. In­jec­tion mould­ing, tool design and tool mak­ing are moved to the new build­ing with an area of 1750 m².

In 2010 a gal­van­ized lead frame is in­sert-moul­ded, auto­mat­ic­ally sep­ar­ated, fit­ted with an ad­di­tion­al metal part, sub­jec­ted to a high voltage check and a 100%-in­spec­tion.
A year later a cam­era sys­tem is in­tro­duced for 100% control of stamped bands after the punching press.
A lead frame on band is automatically fed into an injection moulding machine with in­line sep­ar­a­tion afterwards, auto­mat­ic­ally 100%-checked visu­ally and tact­ilely, sub­jec­ted to a high voltage check and, finally, auto­mat­ic­ally stored in trays.

After ac­quir­ing a neigh­bour­ing plot of 2000 m² in 2012, con­struc­tion of an ex­ten­sion build­ing with 700 m² of floor space for the stamp­ing de­part­ment starts in 2015.