About Us

Our modern, well-equipped factory consistently produces high quality laminations with  'state of the art' tool design facilities, and our facilities are equally well suited for low and high volume manufacturing. Profile projectors and other sophisticated measuring equipment are employed to monitor manufacturing tolerances. Line-up quality, done on current generation Weingarten NK machines, is comparable with the best in the world.

Latest technology wire-cutting machinery is used for the manufacture of our press tooling. All our laminations undergo rigorous quality control, with full traceability, from the raw material stage to finished product. 

With worldwide growth in the demand for electrical equipment we have continued an investment programme for the latest mass-production techniques. Our extensive facilities and experience can be applied to produce stampings in a wide range of materials to any engineering specifications. The tool room offers computer aided design facilities together with computerised wire-cutting to produce tools and dies to either your or our specifications and a combined expertise that ensures products of the highest quality.

Unilam Pressings was previously the laminations division of GKN Sankey with over 20 years of lamination production in South Africa before becoming an independent company in May 1986. When Siemens were manufacturing motors in South Africa, Unilam produced all of their new 1LA6 range of low voltage laminations as well as high voltage up to frame size FS560.

Hawker Siddeley/Brush and Alstom both had their own in-house lamination facilities but also used Unilam extensively for quick deliveries and overflow work. Ballast laminations were made for all of the major lighting companies. The mining industry is covered extensively with laminations used in scraper winch motors, traction motors for underground locomotives, conveyor motors and flameproof motors on all of the big coal cutting machines. The railways are also big customers for traction motor armature cores and fully assembled pole pieces.

Exports play a major role in Unilam's expansion and large motor laminations are presently shipped to the UK, USA and Europe. We have also exported some 1280mm diameter cores where the stators were fully assembled, wound, vacuum impregnated and tested prior to shipment. This assembly work was done for us by M&C (Marthinusen and Coutts) here in Johannesburg.