Renewable Energy Powers South Africa Through LEMCO

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A company focused on innovation, Lemco strives to be the best in the South African steel market. Contributing to the growth of the renewable energy market, Lemco fabricated the 346-acre Khi Solar One, the very first solar plant in South Africa. See how Lemco constructed this impressive project and other large industrial buildings through the use of their Advantage-2 drill line, Anglemaster-643/Q angle line and HSFDB-C plate processor.

There is one specific project that I would like to identify three years back we did a wind tower manufacturing facility in Atlantis in the Western Cape.

It's a 40 meter wide by 350 meter long building, 18 meter height with massive cranes inside, and it was lattice steel columns.

And we asked the engineer on the project if we can drill the beams and bolt the angles in. And he said, yes we can, but he wants zero tolerances because he's concerned about slippage in the bolts.

And if my memory serves me correctly, there was 19,600 bolts in the columns of that building. And not one bolt did not fit by hand, which for me was a true triumph of the technology.

My father started the company, he's turning 70 this year. And he started with small scale metal work in his early 20s and that evolved to probably in the mid 90s, 95, 96.

This full on swing was over to structural steel and LEMCO the name was created in 2017 and became its own entity then.

The market we serve is probably about 80% Western Cape, if you know the South African landscape, our target market will definitely be large industrial buildings, and we've been very involved with the renewable energy markets that's been very prominent in our Northern Cape province over the last five years. So, I would say, a split between that and heavy industrial.

If there's one specific Peddinghaus machine that I can identify that is crucial to our operation is the drill line.

It just is the solve of the work shop floor, and 95% of all beams go through it, and just the accuracy and the speed of the machine is just phenomenal.

It's just made the day and night different. Just immediately put you in the next level in our industry. The main benefits that the machines have for us in our company is basically twofold, capacity, and accuracy. It's just paramount in our industry and you cannot get any better.

When we started to invest in Peddinghaus machines our production sky rocketed.

I can remember the first week that we bought the machine, the drill line, we were busy with the massive plant, and we did approximately 80 columns a week.

And when we started using the machines that's almost went up to--I would say about 500 tons a week. So, made a massive difference.

Of course you didn't have to mark anything out, you know that everything will be on target measurements will be correct, and it just made everything a lot easier.

LEMCO's future, I would like to emphasize one of our core values which is innovation. We as a company still have no appetite to stop growing and for the South African steel market to keep on growing.

You must incorporate as much CNC equipment as possible and then incorporate from the building industry. So that we can start dictating our own future in the local market.

So, we are trying to create our own destiny, and we'll see where it takes us.