BERGAMO, ITALY — Pedrini recently installed resin plants for two major stone-production plants in Italy — at Graniti Carobbio and at Fratelli Madaschi in the factories of Carobbio degli Angeli.

The customized plant made for Graniti Carobbio is for processing granite slabs, and a roller conveyor on rotating base has reduced the required space by fitting an automatic loader/unloader in a limited space. The plant further includes a device for positioning raw slabs on trays and for unloading processed slabs, a resining section and a fast lifter for feeding and unloading the trays into a 50-space oven. The oven has 10 spaces for drying and “pre-heating” and 40 to achieve the polymerization temperature. Besides the traditional resining, the plant allows Graniti Carobbio to aesthetically treat black granite, and it can unload the processed slabs and send them to a warehouse — or transport them directly to the polishing line.

At Fratelli Madaschi, Pedrini has established a plant that has a production capacity of nearly 13,000 square feet of granite strips per eight-hour shift. The plant processes 11-mm-thick granite strips with optimal automation and productivity. The intervention by operators is only needed to position the pallets with the strips to be processed in the loading area and for unloading the pallets with processed strips from the unloading area. These two areas are very close and on the same side of the plant. A vacuum lifter positions the strips side by side on trays that are transferred to the lower layer by a lifter, and they go through a “tunnel oven” that dries and warms the strips to the ideal temperature for resin application. Trays exit the other end of the plant and are lifted by a second lifter to the resining section. There, a robot evenly sprays the resin on the surface. Trays are then positioned on a lift and move into a two-tower vertical oven for polymerizing the resin.

The tray continues up to the unloading area, and an automatic unloader with a vacuum lifter takes one strip at a time from the resined side to transfer it to a second vacuum lifter to position it on the pallet with the raw face upward, making it ready to be loaded on the gauging machine of the finishing line.