Experience OLFRY

Facts & Figures

In business for more than 100 years

1907 On 8 February 1907, August Freiherr von Frydag, the great-great-grandfather of today’s company boss Udo von Frydag, acquired the “Peters Stelle” in the Hagen farming community near Vechta. At that time, there was already a rural brickworks on today’s company premises.

15 hectares OLFRY has 15 hectares of land, including clay quarries.

1962 In 1962, Udo von Frydag registered the trademark “OLFRY” with the crown logo.

1976 In 1976, “OLFRY” was registered as a company name. “OL” stands for Oldenburg, “FRY” for Frydag.

5.000 Over 5,000 reference buildings on www.olfry.de

100 facing bricks www.olfry.de With a range of more than 100 types of facing bricks and clinker strips, colour-coordinated paving clinkers and a variety of shaped bricks, OLFRY is the first choice when it comes to bricks.

945,000 bricks The old kiln of the past became a production line for up to 945,000 bricks per week.

1975 Since 1975, a factory impregnation of visible surfaces has ensured that efflorescence is a thing of the past.

2015 On 1 January 2015, Udo von Frydag took over the management of OLFRY-Ziegelwerke GmbH & Co KG from his father, Georg Wilhelm von Frydag.

Experience, tradition and know-how – quality made in Germany

OLFRY is a family business in the best sense of the word: family-run, classically conservative yet dynamic enough to operate innovatively and successfully on the market for more than 100 years thanks to its flat hierarchies. Quality product “Made in Germany” is part of the OLFRY DNA. In addition to our own internal auditing, regular certification by independent institutes ensures our high quality standard.

Exhibition

Anyone wanting to build a house with a brick façade will be interested in finding the right clinker brick from the earliest planning phase. Building project managers who are well informed and competently advised by the architect or manufacturer will find the right brick for their house.
Every kind of architecture has its own clinker brick that fits best. For contemporary styles, architects usually recommend a dark, blue-brown clinker brick. The North German clinkers in bright brick red with a blue edge match the style of a modern Frisian house, while a dark red clinker is often chosen for a Westphalian country house.
For all architectural styles, it is important to find the brick that fits best and the best material combinations for windows, doors and roof tiles. When selecting these elements, care should be taken to ensure that the colour and surface structure match the clinker brick. OLFRY offers a good opportunity to check this out in its brick exhibition. It features combinations of clinker surfaces with roof tiles and window profiles. But you also have the option of placing material samples you have brought yourself to the front of the sample wall of the desired clinker in order to examine the effect.
Regardless of whether you are building turnkey or individually with your own architect – every client should get an idea of the large selection in advance.

The complete OLFRY brick range is available for viewing at our premises (Friesenstraße 9–11) on weekdays from
8 am to 5 pm.

The OLFRY model garden at McDonald’s (corner of Friesenstraße/Lohner Straße) can be visited at any time.

Our production

1Clay storage hall

The clay storage hall is used for the storage of 12,000 cubic metres of various clays. It enables operation independent of weather conditions. The exact dosing of the various production mixtures is carried out with the aid of the box feeder line, which is controlled by belt weighers and transports the material to the pan grinder.

2Pan grinder

The pan grinder has a net weight of 55 tons. This is where the material is mixed and ground.

3 Rolling mills

Three rolling mills connected in series crush the material to a grain size of less than one millimetre.

4 Clay silos

The mixture is fed into two clay silos via conveyor belts and a distribution device. Here, the hand moulding and extrusion moulding masses are stored separately. The capacity is sufficient for three days.

5Extrusion press

The processed material is conveyed via a conveyor line to the extrusion press, where the blanks are formed. After surface treatment, the cutter cuts the strand into the desired formats with absolute dimensional accuracy.

6 Water-struck press

The same conveyor line also serves the water-struck press in which the clinker brick from the deLuxe series is pressed.

7 Chamber dryer

Within 44 hours, the moisture is removed from the fresh blanks, which have been placed on laths, in a chamber dryer.

8Setting plant

The setting plant places the dried bricks on tunnel kiln cars, whose axes are protected from the high temperatures in the kiln by the fireclay structure.

9Preheater

The finished tunnel kiln cars are lined up in front of the preheater and pushed in as required.

10Tunnel kiln

The tunnel kiln is supplied with new goods every day, including weekends. Here the extruded bricks are fired at a maximum temperature of 1020°C for 60 hours. The furnace is operated with natural gas and partly with landfill gas. During firing, the colour ruby-red is produced, which can be transformed into patina (red-coloured flame-finished) by the subsequent reducing firing method.

11Destacking and sorting plant

In the destacking and sorting plant, the fired extruded bricks are sorted according to appearance and strength, impregnated and automatically packaged.

12Hand moulding press

The hand moulding material passes through the corrugating mixer into the hand moulding press, which provides the hand moulding character that we all know from the past.

13Chamber drying

The blanks are transported on metal shelves to the chamber drying plant. The drying time is 60 hours.

14 Hand moulding plant

They are then fed to the hand moulding plant.

15Tunnel kiln

The tunnel kiln fires the bricks in 70 hours, also using natural gas or landfill gas. The fired bricks are characterized by the typical OLFRY ruby-red or patina (red-coloured flame-finished) which can be attributed to our ferrous raw material.

16Packaging line

The packaging line destacks and packs the bricks fully automatically after they have been inspected by the sorter. All of the extruded bricks are delivered on returnable pallets that are shrink-wrapped in plastic sheet.

17Flue gas cleaning plant

The flue gas cleaning plant installed in 1993 filters fluorine and sulphur from the exhaust gases.

18Chimney

At a height of 72 metres, the chimney, which serves both the extrusion plant and the hand-moulded brickworks, is the tallest building in the Vechta district and is a local landmark.

19Control centre

From the control centre, the two tunnel kilns and the flue gas cleaning plant are controlled and monitored fully automatically with the aid of computers.

Impressions

Bricks and clinkers
are our tradition – OLFRY

Environmental protection

1. Sand
2. Hydrated lime
3. Grit (carrier material)
4. Lime milk conditioner
5. Reactivator
6. Stripping machine
7. Fabric filter
8. Deep-bed reactor
9. Chimney
10. Tunnel kiln
11. Heat recovery
12. Residual product

To protect the environment as far as possible from harmful exhaust gases is a highly desirable goal. OLFRY has come a lot closer to reaching this goal. We were the first European brickworks to install an innovative flue gas cleaning plant that filters not only fluorine but also sulphur from the exhaust gases, thereby saving primary energy (e.g. natural gas) through heat recovery and slowing down the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The process is a dry, wastewater-free system based on hydrated lime. Two deep-bed reactors prevent around 300 tonnes of sulphur dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere every year.
The amount of heat generated by flue gas cooling could be used to heat 20 single-family homes. It is used in the cleaning process, among other things, and partially replaces other heat sources during operation.

Conserving resources

The sustainable use of natural resources is a top priority at OLFRY. Because of this, we attach great importance to comprehensive energy management, which monitors the use of resources such as electricity and natural gas and continuously reduces energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite steadily increasing production volumes by up to 50%, energy consumption has been kept stable since 2010, for example.
OLFRY’s energy management has been certified by independent testing laboratories and is continuously monitored by means of regular audits.