African Helical Flight Manufacturer

Jun 15, 2016

“The Operative” has been manufacturing Continuous Rolled and Sectional flights in Africa for over 40 years and is imprinted in Africa as the leading manufacturer of Helical Flights, Over the many years “The Operative” strive to manufacture quality, accurate helical flights in a timely manner, meeting these requirements over the years has been a challenge when manufacturing sectional helical flights, as the traditional way of doing things was time consuming and expensive and the accuracy not always guaranteed. This lead us to start searching for a new improved way of pressing helical flights that would meet the requirements as set out by the customer.

After two years of research, looking locally and abroad at various manufactures of flight pressing machines and endless YouTube videos we came across AST “Advanced Spiral Technology” who had a unique way of pressing helical flights, which met the requirements we were looking for.

On receiving the new machine, a few things needed doing to set it all up and we were ready for training. The AST team arrived double checked that everything was in order with the machine and software, and then proceeded to train our new youngsters, in operating the SuperTyro™ Forming Machine. Within one week our youngsters were pressing quality helical flights better than those that have been pressing helical flights for 20 years.

“We were impressed when we saw the demo but we were blown away when we realised how easy the new technology was to use.”

After a few weeks of pressing various helical flights and getting the hang of the training received, we found that we are now able to press helical flights in half the time at half the cost, we were now also able to offer our clients Hardox helical flights. In previous years we were restricted to SS10/200 (Bennox) as pressing any other ware resistant material was just not an option that is now a thing of the past our investment in the AST technology has opened doors to our clients that were never open before, and has given us a market edge on Ware Resistance helical Flights.

When it came to support although we were thousands of km away from AST the support received from all members of AST has been phenomenal and any questions or queries were answered with in 24hrs “keeping in mind the different time zone”

Over all we feel that buying this technology from AST has been money well spent and we are already working on buying our next set of tooling from them to expand our pressing range.