Everyone meet the Wedge Wire team

What is wedge wire? Wedge wire is a welded constructed product wherein profiled wire with a triangular shape, is fusion welded to support rods at equal pitches along the underside of the screening surface.

Wedge wire products are used in various industries such as mining (especially coal and gold). It is, however, also used in other industries with success such as chemical, food and beverage, brewing, sugar, as well as sewerage and water treatment. The main attribute that wedge wire offers is a highly accurate aperture ranging from 300 µm to 20 mm which clients then use to size, dewater and separate product in their plants. Due to the stainless-steel construction, the product can be used at elevated temperatures, where high acidic or alkali levels are present or where strict hygiene conditions must be observed.

Our wedge wire team is a very diverse team filled with strong and interesting characters, yet all pushing towards a common goal. Our differences are what make us stronger.

We are a big department of 137 people plus an additional 5 supporting team members from Multotec Group of Companies who are permanently on site. Our team ranges in skill level from unskilled to different grades of artisans to professionals.

Business Unit Manager – Wedge Wire, Steel & Projects, Multotec Manufacturing

Karen Joubert, Business Unit Manager – Wedge Wire, Steel & Projects, Multotec Manufacturing

Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organisational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”
- Andrew Carnegie

We are very proud of our internal promotion strategy where we give all a chance to develop into different roles. We can share many success stories, but one, in particular, comes to mind where one of our team members started employment at Wedge Wire as a sandblasting operator, moved into a forklift driver position, then became a team leader and today is a supervisor for one of our biggest product lines where he needs to interface with a top client on a daily basis.

We are also seeing transformation in our manufacturing environment and are proud to have 6 women on our shopfloor who have brought a completely different dynamic onto the shopfloor with very positive results.

Back to our wedge wire products. Once the wedge wire has been welded on one of our CNC welding machines, the real value add begins. The product is now trimmed, split, flattened, rerolled, assembled, welded, pickled and passivated or painted, etc. until we have a product that meets client requirements. These operations are very labour intensive and manual. Our product range is vast, ranging from flat mats to framed panels, hybrid products such as poly wedge panels, to sieve bends, centrifuge baskets and CIP/CIL cylinders, to name but a few. On some of the products, we collaborate internally with other Multotec Manufacturing departments to get to a product that is sellable to our clients.

What makes the wedge wire product unique is that the supply chain is quite complicated and months long as all the profile wires and support rods are imported, while the market expectation is a quick turnaround on the product as it is a wearing consumable. The raw material is only available in different grades of stainless steels i.e. AISI 430, 304, 316 and duplex stainless steels. We thus have a very robust stock holding strategy wherein we need to consider our demand against the roughly 80 variations of profile wire and material grades available all while considering capital tied up in stock holding.

Our end products are also vastly different in size and shape ranging from a small 2-kilogram product to a cylinder weighing more than 700 kilograms per unit.