Tin ceilings struck one panel at a time

Why every panel still goes under the press one at a time

My name is Hanlie Vosloo and the dies came out of a sheet-metal works in Port Elizabeth that closed in the winter of 1994. My father bought eleven of them for less than the scrap price of the steel, mostly because nobody else in the room knew what they were for. Four are still in daily use, and the marks they leave in the zinc are the same marks that went into the dorpshuise up and down this street in the 1890s. Every panel is struck one at a time on a hand fly press. You set the sheet, you swing the arm, you take it off, and a room’s worth of ceiling is fifty or sixty of those. Two of us work the presses and my son does the cutting and the crating. People ask why there are not more patterns. A new die is cut by hand out of tool steel and takes a die-sinker in Uitenhage about five months, and the last one cost R94 000 before a single sheet went through it. So we press what we have and we press it properly. If you are restoring something, phone before you order — half the time the pattern you need is already in the rack.