Day after day, we are fully occupied assembling hörberts. Yes, we do it by hand, and yes, we do it here in Frickenhausen at the foot of the UNESCO Swabian Alb Biosphere Reserve. For a change, we turned the tables and dissected one of our hörberts – down to the smallest snippet.

This led to a small “inventory” of the materials that go into hörbert – and we present the result here:

Wood: 558 grams

The wooden cabinet, the back panel, the handle and the loudspeaker cover make up the largest part of the weight with 55.3% of the total weight.

Metals: 395 grams

All screws, washers, screw-in threads, the speaker with magnet (the magnet alone weighs 248g!), the metal parts from the buttons, the volume control and the switch together make up 39.1% of the total weight.

Printed circuit board: 32 grams

It consists of a sandwich of about 50% glass fibre and 50% copper surfaces and conductors. We preferred not to disassemble it further in order to be able to write this article before the end of the year… The empty circuit board makes up about 3.2% of the total weight.

Plastic: 20 grams

Buttons, keycaps, SD card slot, spacers and foam rubber of the loudspeaker, small parts from the electromechanical components and the vibration protection made of polyester felt for the sliding lid. All in all, that’s not even 2% of the total weight!

Paper and cardboard: 4 grams

The loudspeaker membrane and the vibration protection for the keys represent 0.4% of the total weight.

Lacquer: 12 grams

We can only estimate the weight of our water-based lacquer. The lacquer has a solid content of 32% (i.e. 1l of sprayed lacquer corresponds to approx. 340g of lacquer). After intermediate sanding and a second coat, about 12g of solids remain on the cabinet. This is 1.1% of the total weight.

The topic of sustainability drives us and surrounds us every day. That’s why we sound out with hörbert what is technically possible and affordable. In our search for suitable materials and methods, we are always interested in improving ourselves and our products: For the limited anniversary edition, we replaced the standard ABS keycaps with wooden keycaps, and we always like something like that.