Menck & Hambrock was a Hamburg-based German steam and diesel shovel builder.
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The company was founded in 1868 by Johannes Menck and Diedrich Hambrock to build boilers and steam engines. Their first excavator was constructed in 1888. Even before the First World War, Menck was a world-class producer of excavators. The company produced the first shovel bucket excavator in the world in 1901 and, starting in 1923, produced the series of M II, M III and M IV machines: the first crawler excavators in Europe. One of the latter models survived and has been restored. Today the company operates as MENCK GbmH.
In 1933, following the Caterpillar 60, Menck designed the first German bulldozer. With co-operation from Hanomag Universal Diesel, they designed the express excavator series of Mo, mA, MT, Mc and MD. Menck drove the design and development of earth-scraping devices which served a new market. Invented in 1939, the unique Schürfkübelraupe, which was produced by Menck into the 70's, is now built by a Japanese manufacturer under licence.
After the Second World War, pressure from the Occupation Powers and the West German Federal Government urged the company to switch capacities from production of weapons to excavator and crane building, as this equipment was urgently needed. Reconstruction of a demolished Central Europe was paramount, and so Menck continued, first with the aforementioned series of excavators and then. starting in 1948, with a completely new line with designations such as M152, M75, M60 and M90.
In 1966 Menck was bought by the US company Koehring and declared bankruptcy in 1978. Many Menck developments were taken over by other companies. Menck, now reconstituted, builds offshore drilling equipment and deep sea pile driving products. Today the company operates as MENCK GbmH