Stainless steel is a relatively new material and its diverse uses are only now really being appreciated. One of the pioneers of stainless steel working in South Africa, A.L. Collins & Co. (Pty.) Limited, handled their first sheet in 1923 to test the properties and potential of this new material and they have been working stainless steel ever since.
Today the company devotes a great deal of its activities to the production of special equipment from stainless steel. This includes special diameter and wall thickness tubing, made to customer’s specifications which cannot be met by standard tubing. Another feature is the production of stainless steel ducting for fume extraction plants and hand-made urn cocks and valves of special dimensions.
A.L. Collins manufacture stainless steel toilet bowls for the railways in South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Rhodesia. They in fact undertake a great variety of jobbing work for the chemical, mining, photographic, textile dying, medical supply and dry cleaning industries.
Incinerators which utilize many stainless steel parts play an important part in the company’s manufacturing activities and are made for both domestic and industrial purposes. The company also manufactures a range of heating products from column radiators to large sectional boilers for heating water and these are sold under the registered brand name of ‘Lucifer’.
The firm has recently installed a large guillotine which can handle stainless steel of up to 3/8 of an inch thick [9.5 mm] where previously they had to use rolls, press brakes and hydraulic presses to work with this thick material. They also recently acquired wire feed Argon arc welding equipment for high speed welding on large vessels such as the recently completed stainless steel pressure vessels to Asme Codes.
The manipulation of these large vessels requires space and the company’s premises in Benrose includes a sizable boiler ship with two travelling gantries to assist in the handling of the heavier materials. Among the recent contracts undertaken by this firm has been three tanks made form 1/8-inch [3.2 mm] stainless steel plate and each one is 16 feet [4.9 m] high and 14½ feet [4.4 m] in diameter.
It has been companies such as A.L. Collins that have been the nucleus in the rapid development of South Africa. They have never been afraid of progress or experiment as shown in the stainless steel industry.
