This discussion has been here before on this board in
this thread
This is what Christian Oltzscher had to say about the matter:
Christian Oltzscher said:
The CT dust extractors were developed by TTS (the parent company of Festool) and Kraenzle Cleantec and are manufactured by Kraenzle Cleantec. Since
2008 Kraenzle Cleantec is fully owned by TTS and renamed in TTS Cleantec. Kraenzle itself remains an independent company, developing, manufacturing
and selling high pressure cleaners and sweepers.
Christian
Since the CTL 11, 22, 33, 44, 55 were already developed before the year 2000 (you can still find them with the name FESTO on them) you can rest assured they were mainly developed by Kranzle engineers, undoubtedly with TTS's engineering and marketing departments keeping a watchful eye over the process. Kranzle is the dedicated cleaning company after all.
As I believe it was Michael_MA who explained in another thread that Festool is located in sort of a "Silicon Valley" for power tools in Germany, where many tool manufacturers are located very closely to each other, you can rest assured there are many co-operations and joint ventures among them. One of the most common things with tool companies is to get their vacuums from dedicated vacuum cleaner manufacturers. The biggest companies I know about who do this are Starmix and Nilfisk-Alto. A lot of power tool brands get their vacs from those two companies.
For instance Starmix delivers vacs for Hitachi, Bosch, Metabo, AEG and many more. This is the most common vac out there.
[attachimg=1]
And Festool simply did this too. As far as I know a lot of their vacs under the Festo name in the 90's came from Alto. Some, like the SRM and SRH models still do. Then when the CTL 11 to 55 models came they switched to Kranzle.
Here you can see the CTL22 and 33 as the Kranzle models Ventos 25 and 35.
[attachimg=2][attachimg=3]
But now of course Kranzle is also part of the TTS family, so now Festool, or should I say TTS, can say they make their own vacs.