One shift of nine hours gives Oconbrick one million clay stock bricks a day at their manufacturing plant based at Three Rivers, Vereeniging. The plant, which boasts a brand new crushing plant as well as six brick extruders, operates on a single daily shift for 48 weeks per year that keeps production on track, ensuring that stock is always available.

The continuing growth in the development and refurbishment of residential and commercial properties in South Africa has kept clay stock bricks in demand. Enormous projects such as Cradlestone Mall, near Krugersdorp, Standard Bank’s new offices in Rosebank and various health club, motor vehicle outlets, offices and residential parks, all form part of the Oconbrick portfolio of experience.

Quality

The bricks are manufactured on site with an average of 48,000 cubes of clay being mined monthly to meet production requirements. All Oconbrick clay stock bricks are subjected to stringent quality testing. Oconbrick have their own on-site laboratory to test for: size, efflorescence, water absorption, shrinkage and compressive strength. The carbon content of the bricks gets tested on an hourly basis with a carbon determinator. Random selections of clay stock bricks are sent to an external laboratory for SANS 227 compliance testing on a monthly basis.

New Equipment

Oconbrick invested in a grog crusher, which came online in July. The crusher has a capacity to crush 46 tons of bricks per hour to a size of 4mm. Reject bricks are dumped into a box feeder and fed into a jaw crusher where they become crushed to a maximum size of 40 mm. The 40 mm crushed particles are conveyed to a double deck vibrator where the crushed materials are screened are screened and stockpiled  and thereafter  the materials bigger than 5 mm is finally crushed by a Hazamac impact crusher to the required size.

Reputation

Due to Oconbrick’s vast contract portfolio, the company has built up a solid reputation for quality, reliability, professionalism and stock availability. The implementation of cost controls and quality standards and their flexibility in meeting their customer’s specific requirements, and indeed, at times their customer’s on-site challenges, is one of the key factors in their dominance of market share.

It is the fact that Oconbrick are able to supply large quantities of quality bricks to construction sites at a competitive price that keeps the customer’s happy and the production plant fully activated.