When was ASK founded?

ASK was founded by my great great grandfather well-builder Christian Weiss in 1860 as a company for laying water pipelines. Since then the company has always been family owned and has always been adapting new materials and manufacturing processes in its daily business.

Where is the company located?

We are located in Kulmbach in the beautiful region of Upper-Franconia / Northern Bavaria. From here we provide solutions in civil engineering all over northern Bavaria and the neighboring provinces or states within Germany while our customers in the pulp and paper business are spread all over central Europe and Scandinavia.

What is your main business?

Our main business is civil engineering basically including every supply pipeline ranging from water to gas (including hydrogen) to district heating and sewage. Aside from that we are supplier for the pulp and paper industry focusing mainly on stock preparation and hydraulic parts mainly nozzles. Here we supply solutions enabling a higher time to wear-off by lower consumption of energy and/or water and by that lower total-cost of ownership.

When did you start working with Ikeuchi and why?

We started working directly with IKEUCHI in 2021. Before that we had been buying and reselling IKEUCHI products via a distributor in Japan.
Knowing the quality and reliability of IKEUCHI nozzles (ensuring runability of our customers’ machines) we switched to IKEUCHI Europe establishing a direct contact and reducing hassle with importing goods from Japan.

What is unique about your products or approach?

In both – civil engineering and for the pulp and paper industry – we have a strong background of engineers. By that we can closely evaluate our customers needs and find the fitting solution. In both areas our customers value the longevity of our products and the goods we supply. By that we keep the total cost of ownership of solutions sold at a economical level for our customers. This applies to our own products in stock preparation, our construction sites in civil engineering, just as well as to the products we acquire from IKEUCHI.

What has been one of the most interesting projects you have worked on?

While our most interesting projects in civil engineering usually are full scale developments of domestic or industrial development areas, including hydrogen pipelines, our most challenging projects in the pulp and paper business have been introducing screw presses with interchangeable parts, that lasted more than twice as long as that of our competitors. Concerning hydraulic parts one of our major challenges still is equipping large parts of the pulp and paper production process with parts supplied by us while reducing water consumption and increasing life time of individual parts. We are in such a process with a larger mill in northern Germany where we managed to exchange an existing stainless steel nozzle with a newly developed ceramic equivalent by IKEUCHI and by that pushing life time of the spare parts to new limits.

What is your focus for the future? 

Our focus is (and has always been) using state of the art equipment to ensure sustainability of our solutions and the jobs of our employees. Based on that we are positive that we will play a major role in northern Bavaria in our field of expertise in civil engineering and to become the one-stop-shop concerning hydraulic solutions in the pulp and paper business.