The EIC Accelerator Backed Hachtel's 3D Printed Parts: Did It Work

F. & G. Hachtel is a family-owned plastics company in Aalen, in the east of Baden-Württemberg, that makes injection moulded parts and their moulds and inspects components with industrial computed tomography (CT). In 2019 it set out to add a third business: printing spare parts that nobody stocks any more, for trains, machines and vehicles, with a 3D printing process developed by the Vienna start-up Cubicure.

The two companies won a joint grant in the European Commission's 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator. The Commission's list of selected companies gives the project, called Hot Lithography, two rows: Hachtel in Aalen and Cubicure GmbH in Vienna. Hachtel was the coordinator and took the larger share of the money, €971,288.50 of the €1,792,388.50 EU contribution, according to CORDIS. Cubicure's side of the story, which ended in a sale to Align Technology, is told in a separate deep dive. This article follows the coordinator.

Where Hachtel Stands Now

The company that signed the grant no longer exists as a separate legal entity, but the business it ran does. The register publications collected by North Data show changes among the limited partners of F. & G. Hachtel GmbH & Co. KG in August 2025 and, in a filing published on 15 January 2026, the departure of its last limited partner and the termination of the partnership. The only partner left was its general partner, which on 9 October 2025 had changed its name from Kunststoffwerk Hachtel GmbH to F. & G. Kunststoffwerk Hachtel GmbH and widened its corporate purpose to the moulds, tools, plastic parts and non-destructive testing that the KG used to sell, according to the GmbH's own register record. Under German partnership law, when only one partner remains the partnership ends without liquidation and its assets pass to that partner by universal succession (§ 712a of the Civil Code). In practice the KG's business carries on, active, in its own general partner.

The company's imprint now names F. & G. Kunststoffwerk Hachtel GmbH, HRB 500096, with Steffen Hachtel as managing director, at the same Aalen address CORDIS lists for the KG, but under a new VAT number: DE 415075391 instead of the DE144631587 on the CORDIS participant record. No insolvency appears in either register record. The KG filed annual accounts every year up to the 2024 accounts, published in June 2025, but the figures are not free to read, so revenue, profit and staff since the grant could not be verified.

The business is visibly operating. The website, copyrighted 2026, offers injection moulding, mould making, industrial CT and additive manufacturing, and its jobs page advertises a full-time process mechanic post in Aalen. The 3D printing offer is still on the homepage: "With Hot Lithography technology we produce additively manufactured parts with the highest precision", flame-retardant and heat-resistant. The page the homepage links to for details, however, returned "page not found" when checked for this article, and none of the site's remaining pages describe printed spare parts.

An Injection Moulder With X-Ray Eyes

Hachtel's history is told in a company brochure published on the supplier platform Techpilot. The brothers Friedrich and Georg Hachtel founded a pressing and turning shop in 1934. The company turned to plastics in 1962 with a patented curtain ring made at up to 40 million pieces a month, added two-component injection moulding in 1983, engineering services in 2002 and industrial CT in 2007. In 2018 it bought a plastic 3D printer for the Hot Lithography process and, the brochure says, was qualified by Airbus for non-destructive testing and added to Airbus's "Qualified Special Process List", which it describes as one of five companies worldwide qualified to inspect additively manufactured parts as of October 2020. A metal printer using Trumpf's Laser Metal Fusion followed in 2019. That Airbus claim comes from the company alone and could not be checked against an Airbus source.

The dates differ between the company's own accounts. The brochure dates the CT service to 2007; a November 2021 press release of the regional development agency WiRO quotes Steffen Hachtel as saying CT has been used since 2008, as does the archived project website. The same press release says the company has used additive manufacturing in-house since 2013, while the project website said in 2020 that Steffen Hachtel "began to test additive manufacturing technologies for functional components about 3 years ago".

The project website gave the size of the company: "about 55 employees and a turnover of more than 10 M€". The brochure says about 60. Neither figure is dated precisely, and no filed figure is free to read.

What Hachtel Brought to the Project

The printing technology was Cubicure's. Hot Lithography heats a highly viscous resin, spreads it in thin layers on a heated carrier and cures each layer with a laser, which lets it use tough, high-performance photopolymers that ordinary stereolithography printers cannot process, as the CORDIS report and Hachtel's own additive manufacturing brochure both describe. On Hachtel's machine the build volume was 200 by 100 by 300 mm, with layers of 10 to 100 µm, a 375 nm laser and a 20 µm laser focus, according to that brochure.

Hachtel's part was the chain around the printer. CORDIS describes Hachtel as "the first industrial user of this technology", offering "a complete integrated procurement solution": scanning an old part with CT when no drawing exists, redesigning and optimising it, printing it, and then qualifying the printed part by CT, "a key requirement to use AM parts in industry". That combination is what distinguishes the idea from a print bureau: in rail or machine maintenance, the hard part is often not printing a replacement but proving that it matches the original and holds up.

What the Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 24 July 2019 and the project ran from 1 August 2019 to 31 December 2021, 29 months, as planned, according to CORDIS. Hachtel's budgeted cost was €1,387,555, of which the EU paid 70%. The proposal targeted spare parts for transport, automotive, aerospace and machine tools, named Siemens and Deutsche Bahn as corporations "actively searching for AM suppliers", and expected "70 additional jobs and an additional turnover of 13.4M€ until 2023 at both SMEs".

The final periodic report, covering August 2020 to December 2021, is mostly about Cubicure: four new resins, a TÜV Austria process certificate, the Caligma printer brought to market readiness and the larger Cerion printer launched in November 2021. Hachtel's work gets two sentences: it "optimised the integrated procurement process including the digitalisation and qualification by FEM and industrial CT", and "several pilot projects were already performed by the companies to provide spare parts e.g. for German and Swiss railway companies. First customers were won, for spare-parts, but also for small and medium-series production of functional parts, like electric connectors or microfluid nozzles."

The project website named some of them. Its archived showcase pages list a handle and a keyboard track ball ring for Deutsche Bahn, both posted in March 2020; a ventilation grille for an unnamed mobility customer; and a lamp socket printed in Evolution FR as a spare part for Swiss Federal Railways, posted in September 2020. A May 2021 case study describes series production of a cleaning nozzle with an 85 µm channel for the pipe inspection robot maker IBAK Helmut Hunger, quoting its head of marketing, but it credits Cubicure's material and Caligma printer and does not say which partner printed the part. None of these customers has been confirmed by a second, independent source, and no volumes or contract values were published. By late 2021 the project domain had been turned into a copy of Cubicure's company website.

1. Integrated process: CT scan, redesign, print, CT qualificationDeliveredDescribed in the final report and in Hachtel's brochure.
2. Printed spare parts for rail customersPartlyPilot parts for Deutsche Bahn and Swiss Federal Railways shown on the project website; no volumes or contracts.
3. A lasting spare parts business at HachtelUnverifiedHot Lithography still on the homepage; the detail page is offline and no customer is named after 2021.
4. IP from Hachtel's side of the projectPartlyOne utility model, for an injection moulded breathing mask, unrelated to 3D printing.
5. 70 jobs and €13.4M added turnover by 2023, both partnersNot shownNeither company published job or turnover figures; Hachtel's accounts are not free to read.

A Breathing Mask in a 3D Printing Project

CORDIS lists 11 patents, trademarks and utility models among the project's results. Ten are Cubicure's: six patents on its printing systems and resins and four trademarks, including Caligma and Cerion. The only entry in Hachtel's name is a German utility model titled "Atemmaske", breathing mask, DE 20 2020 103 123, dated 29 May 2020, as the CORDIS results show. Its text on Google Patents describes a reusable mask with a flexible body of thermoplastic elastomer or liquid silicone rubber, made by injection moulding, with an exchangeable filter. Nothing in it concerns Hot Lithography or spare parts. It was filed in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the project was running, and it is the only intellectual property the coordinator reported to the EU.

The inspection side of the business, central to the project's pitch, also looks smaller today. The company brochure counts five CT scanners after a purchase in 2016, the WiRO press release four in November 2021, and the current industrial CT page names two systems, a Zeiss Metrotom 1500 and a Waygate v|tome|x M, while still listing non-destructive testing inspectors certified to levels 2 and 3 of the aerospace standard EN 4179. The page carries customer testimonials dated up to June 2025. Whether the smaller fleet reflects lower demand or newer, more capable machines is not stated.

Why It Matters for Europe

Keeping old equipment running with printed replacement parts fits several EU priorities: industrial resilience, less dependence on distant suppliers, and the circular economy. The EU's Right to Repair Directive of 2024 goes as far as naming 3D printing: under its Article 5(6), manufacturers may not impede independent repairers' use of spare parts made with 3D printers, subject to intellectual property law, as the law firm Bird & Bird summarises. That directive covers consumer goods, not trains or machine tools, but it shows where policy is heading. Hachtel's project was an early attempt to build that capacity inside a traditional German Mittelstand supplier, rather than in a start-up. The technology side succeeded; whether the spare parts market in Aalen did is not visible in any public record.

The Verdict

This article is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout. Hachtel and Cubicure were not asked for comment.