The story of AESSEAL Namibia began back in 2010, when company directors Mr’s Waites and Adam decided to open an office in Namibia. The first team member to join the Namibia group was Hayden Kidd, which meant he had to move from South Africa to Swakopmund and head the opening of the new branch.
It took a good 6 months to get the workshops and offices in place and up to standard. AESSEAL Namibia officially opened their doors for business in June 2011, and jumped at the opportunity of attaining prospective customers. Namibia is a very big country, but the mining community is considerably smaller, the Namibia team had to work extra hard to get the customer base going. The hard work paid off and yielded great success, AESSEAL’s product become a local household name instantly.
The Namibia branch was very fortunate that AESSEAL’s Seals and Systems were a specific requirement during a major uranium mining operation in Namibia. AESSEAL’s Slurry Manager, Hans Keus worked extremely hard to get the seals and systems part of the Phase 3 project. This of course meant that Hayden and his team had to dive in and learn how to swim in slurry and, install and commission 30 odd pumps with CDPH mechanical seals and SWO2 systems with 3 FDU units. The Namibia team was lucky to have also received much-needed help from Arno Nieuwenhuis before he moved to open the Kuruman branch in the Northern Cape.
In 2013 AESSEAL Namibia expanded their resources and appointed Adriaan Blaauw, who would head the Mechanical Seal Repair Facility in Namibia. Adriaan went to AESSEAL UK where he was trained as an approved Seal Repair Technician. This development assisted AESSEAL Namibia to expand their workshop and they were able to buy equipment to help with pump repairs as well. The team also has a trained workshop assistant, Gideon Nashilundo who received extensive Belzona training and the application thereof. Having this combination team on board ensured a constant flow of seal repair and Belzona repair jobs coming through the workshop.
The below before and after photos show a Belzona pipe repair at a major uranium mining operation, this repair saved a lot of down-time and the production on the plant was back within hours.
Another first for Namibia was a Kort nozzle repair for a fishing vessel. The conventional method would have been to weld the areas where the repair was required, which would take days and a lot of money to the customer. AESSEAL did the repair with Belzona 1111 rebuild and coated 3 coats of Belzona 1341. This was done within 2 days and at half the price. Thanks to our Belzona product we have helped our customers reclaim their equipment and bring them back on schedule.
Namibia has many success stories regarding the use and application of Belzona. See below a few success cases with before and after shots.
AESSEAL NAMIBIA has grown tremendously over the past 6 years and they have been able to build up a good amount of stock items readily available to the mines which have resulted in saving them millions of Namibian dollars annually.
As with life, one works hard but the team also get the opportunity every now and then to enjoy and play in their beautiful country. Hayden has been fortunate enough to get involved in mountain biking and took up the challenging Desert Dash 24hr Endurance race with some friends. This endurance race consists of 369km’s which should be completed within 24 hours, travelling from Windhoek to Swakopmund.
The team also get to do a Corporate fishing weekend once a year, fortunately the team seems to be better at selling, and fixing seals and pumps than fishing.
The team have been able to travel up North to Tsumeb, some 600km away from the office in Swakopmund, where they did a Belzona job for one of the most complex copper smelters known in the world. The Bag house boxes which collect Arsenic dust at 130°C were eating away the 6mm plates. All the conventional ways of fixing this problem did not last and cost the company huge amounts of money and long down time.
The below video clips gives an excellent illustration of how the Belzona team addressed this issue and ensured no more down time for this smelter.
Firstly the compartment needs to be grit blasted and the first section of the clip is Rob Daziel our Belzona applications Manager doing all the QC checks. One will note that it was 5 storeys up and Rob was working under extreme difficult conditions. The team applied 2 coats of Belzona 1593, which was selected for the application, which was incidentally also the first time the product was used in Southern Africa. The compartment was a huge success and 10 months later the customer decided to buy more products to cover the remaining 19 compartments. This is an absolute success story for Belzona in Namibia.