Pegasus Profiles expand into recycling applications with their range of HARDOX wear parts.

Having recently celebrated their 40th anniversary, Pegasus Profiles have three busy metal profiling operations across the South of England in Thetford, Daventry and Andover. The HUB recently went along to the head office in Thetford to take a detailed look at the operation and learn more about their involvement with Swedish Steel (SSAB) and the Hardox brand.

This 5000sq m facility employing 42 staff lies in the heart of East Anglia and caters for the high demand of quality profiled plate, both to end users and to the manufacturing industry throughout the region. Owned by Nigel Clark, Pegasus Profiles offers a complete manufacturing service including cutting, grinding, rolling and forming, drilling, fabrication and full assembly. Because of their high quality of work and accredited standards including ISO 9001, they were approached by SSAB in January 2012 to join their elite Hardox Wearpart Network, and are now one of a select few across the UK.

We met with Roy Denyer, one of the Directors of Pegasus Profiles who gave us a full tour “Joining with SSAB and becoming a Hardox dealer has enabled us to expand into other industries, as well as offering our existing client base a brand new range of products to compliment our overall product portfolio. This means that clients can now order a variety of parts making it easier for them, some Hardox, some stainless steel and some aluminium for example. Our team here at our manufacturing facility here have vast experience in metal profiling, and we have invested heavily through the years to make sure that we have every capability in-house, so we can react to our clients’ needs quickly.”

“With Hardox we are highly skilled at cutting, rolling and forming it to produce a totally bespoke product. On-site we have several different options for cutting material with a total of 10 machines available – Four flame cutting, three plasma cutting, two waterjet cutting and more recently laser cutting, with the £0.4m investment equipping our site with a stand-alone high tech laser cutting machine. Here in Thetford we process around 2,000 tonnes of material each year and around 200 tonnes of Hardox in various grades including Hardox 450, Hardox 500 & Hardox 600. Around 15% of our stock is Hardox - in excess of 60 tonnes of stock ranging from 3mm up to 80mm.”

“We deal with many companies who specialise in gravel and sand extraction in the East Anglia region, as well as applications that involve cement and slag, all requiring hardened steel solutions and we are also working with SSAB running trials of Hardox Extreme in the cement industry. We have done more and more in the recycling industry recently and manufacture and supply wear parts that are bespoke to a variety of recycling plants across the south of England. We work hand in hand with the main recycling contractors to create Hardox wear parts for each application.

“Recently we worked with a busy scrap metal facility where they required a complete reline of their press and shear. We manufactured brand new Hardox liner plates along with other key components and parts for this project, to a precise project timeline. Material handling is another interesting and growing area for us, and we have supplied Hardox components for several power stations where they are dealing with various biomass materials.”

Roy introduced us to Iain Harper, Works Director “We have four different ‘nesting’ software packages that we use, as there are a number of different cutting processes for the different types of material and we have multi-skilled operators that can work across the different cutting machines to keep productivity to a maximum. The new laser cutter is handling many more orders, so we are now running two shifts in that department. We have a whole variety of machines in the facility including press breaks, rolling machines capable of rolling 3m wide plates, grinding machines, drills, welding and fabrication areas and heat treatment facilities. The large Lumsden plough grinding machines which have a magnetic base plate are also highly capable of grinding Hardox to a specific thickness if required, so it’s an extremely capable operation here.”

Hardox wearparts centres – the one stop shop for wear products and services
Hardox Wear Plate is world renowned for its strength and durability, even in the harshest, most aggressive operating environments. Now, customers can benefit from a specialist service providing high quality replacement parts for a wide range of quarry and mining machinery and equipment, delivered through a network of regionally based Hardox Wearparts Centres.
As a global initiative, there are Hardox Wearparts Centres operating in more than 40 countries around the world. In the UK, there are currently nine strategically located Wearparts Centres, from Scotland in the north, Northern Ireland through to South Wales and South East England covering all the primary industrial centres - and this figure is expected to increase further over the coming years.

Each Hardox Wearparts Centre has access to the complete product programme and full technical support provided by SSAB for its Hardox brand, which translates to an extremely comprehensive offering of wear parts and services for the quarry and mining industry.

Services include:

• Site visits and technical advice – including technical analysis of requirements and measurements.
• In-house design engineering – redesign of replacement components to provide longer operational life using in-house CAD/CAM and worldwide reference data base.
• Component manufacture – including collection of components and comprehensive in-house manufacturing services.
• Delivery and install – direct delivery and full installation and re-commissioning of replacement parts.
• On-site welding services – an extended service offering, with specialist welding vans creating the possibility to make on-site repairs.
• Ongoing support services – including service agreements, real life wear performance and analysis, plus wear monitoring analysis.

One of the benefits of using Hardox Wearparts Centres is their access to literally thousands of wear products for buckets, tippers, crushers, dozers, shovels, chutes, feeders and pulverisers, plus many more. Accuracy and product quality are key drivers in the business and linked to this significant parts resource, enables replacement wear products to be manufactured, often to higher specification standards, to suit customers specific operating requirements. Hardox Wearparts Centres will undertake the complete replacement or upgrade of a wear part, from initial discussion and site visit, specification recommendation, design and manufacture.
With their strategic regional locations, Hardox Wearparts Centres can often react faster to get replacement wear parts installed quicker than many traditional sources and this, coupled with their knowledge and support through SSAB has proved to be a winning combination for its industry customers