Victrex is further enhancing its ability to provide complete integrated solutions following its acquisition of US-based polymer gears specialist Kleiss Gears. The acquisition by Victrex will help facilitate the rapid development of answers to key challenges facing customers across industries, including enhanced durability and reliability, better performance, significant reductions in energy consumption and weight, and up to 50% reduction in noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH), compared with metal gears.

New and existing customers can now benefit from integrated polymer-based gear capabilities, including design, prototyping, testing, tool design, and manufacture of polymer-based gears. Kleiss Gears has a proven track record stretching over 20 years of replacing and complementing metal gear systems with high-performance engineering polymer gears such as Victrex PEEK.

The pairing of Kleiss Gears’ high precision gear design, testing and manufacturing capability with Victrex’s materials technology, innovation focus, technical excellence, and global commercial scale, provides a new integrated option for customers. Victrex, headquartered in the UK, is now able to better support the development of high performance polymer gears for demanding applications in automotive, energy and other industries - whether a material solution or the complete integrated system solution that customers seek. Family-owned Kleiss Gears has been and is at the forefront of gear and tool design, validation testing, and manufacture of precision engineered polymer gears since 1995.

David Hummel, chief executive of Victrex, said: “The acquisition of Kleiss Gears is in line with our strategy of creating value through high performance polymer solutions and demonstrates how we are moving further downstream to support our customers and our markets. Kleiss Gears offers Victrex the opportunity to accelerate adoption of our Victrex PEEK gear proposition to meet the needs of the automotive industry and is in line with our aim to double the amount of PEEK volume in cars over the medium term. We are delighted to be able to build on the existing expertise of Kleiss and further develop tailor-made solutions for our customers”.

Following the acquisition, Victrex will be able to enhance its offering, including rapid development processes such as material selection, gear and tool design, testing and validation, and precision manufacturing capabilities. This will enable customers to bring robust solutions to the market faster, and subsequently pave the way to greater mutual success.

“We have been partnering with Victrex for many years and are convinced that our customers and end-users will benefit from a more integrated approach, enabling them to develop and launch gears that solve their key challenges with greatly reduced development cycles”, commented Rod Kleiss, president of Kleiss Gears.