Building the Tallest Steel Headgear for the Mining Industry with Steel Services and Allied Industries

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South Africa continues as a global leader within the mining industry. Total reserves remain some of the world's most valuable mineral resources with an estimated worth of $2.5 trillion USD. Overall, the country is estimated to have the world's fifth-largest mining sector. Steel Services & Allied Industries are a major powerhouse within South Africa's mining industry. See how they completed labor intensive headgear structures – a symbol of South Africa mining and a steel structure constructed to facilitate the transfer of men, material and rock from underground.

I would like the world to know that we are a company that likes to innovate, likes to be competitive, and likes to offer a good service.

Steel Services services the mining market.

And we are trying to get into the commercial industry to widen our scope, so that the more work comes out, we can offer more of a service to a wide range of clients.

We are very proud of the two headgear structures that we have built up in Zambian.

And that kind of put us onto the map, if you like. And it's also our first step into getting into Africa. So that's quite an important move for us.

Our headgear is a big steel structure that gets installed in a mining environment, and it ranges between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of steel work.

The margins for error are not very big.

So we had to really make sure our quality was great. We had to make sure the accuracy.

And the Peddinghaus equipment certainly helped us to produce a really good quality product in time.

We knew that if we invested in CNC equipment, we can better control your output and your capacity.

The Peddinghaus machine has played a critical role in a good couple of projects.

And it's taken us from doing things through boilermakers very slowly to speeding up the process tenfold.

Each one of the machines has played a critical part in getting us to the next level of production.

And the speed, specifically on the drill line, is fantastic. It's quick. It's accurate. Your repeatability is good.

What would traditionally take a boilermaker a day to mark out, punch, drill, we were doing within five minutes on the machine.

The plate line, I would say, is one of the most reliable machines.

We kind of feel bad for working those machines so hard. It's crazy how hard we work the Peddinghaus machinery.

And I guess that comes back to the quality of those machines being so robust and so strong. They really can just continue and chug on and on and on.

And we know that we have peace of mind with that specific plate line.

The machines must produce 24 hours a day. The more maintenance and time we put into them, the more they can contribute to that goal.

The Peddinghaus blaster is key for us, because what we've managed to do is we pre-blast some of the steel, and it improves the quality of our welding.

One month, I'll sit and go, wow, how would I do without? How would I manage without that drill line?

And then the next month, I'll go, gee, how would I manage without that angle line?

And then the next month, I'll go, gosh, what a great decision we did to buy that plate line. So they're are equally reliable and equally important to us.

We see steel services continuing to grow.

We think there's a big future with the team that we have and in partnership with the Peddinghaus team so that when times are tough, we can see ourselves through those times.