Making a bold investment in stoneworking technology, JP Granit SP.Z.O.O of Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, Poland, recently invested in state-of-the-art equipment for producing thick flooring, monument slabs, panels and other natural stone products.

Machinery includes two Pedrini “Arco Di Trionfo” M594 blockcutters, which process blocks into strips. JP Granit also invested in an automatic Pedrini cross-cutting line and two large-scale Genesis GS141 saws with a disc diameter of 3,500 mm.

The equipment additions are part of an overall company expansion at JP Granit, which produces stone for building construction, civic projects and funerary art.

The “Arco Di Trionfo” blockcutters are used to cut floors up to 2 inches (5 cm) thick, and they have a total cutting capacity of about 30 meters per day in granite. The automation level of the machines enables JP Granit to achieve high productivity with minimal labor and only periodical supervision, Pedrini reports. The cutting, detaching and positioning of the strips on pallets are carried out by machines that operate on a completely automatic cycle.

Additionally, the blockcutters can make vertical cuts at night without operator supervision, due to the high capacity and length of the block-holding trolleys.

After being processed on the blockcutters, material moves on to a cross-cutting line that includes the Pedrini M301 automatic loader and M747EC-12 cross-cutting machine. This line is capable of converting all 30 meters of production from the blockcutters each day into finished products.

The cross-cutting machine M747EC-12 positions the 12 cutting discs automatically by using a program set on graphic interface managed by touch-screen controls. It can use the entire strip length, performing both a fixed length and sliding cut, while also automatically rejecting the strip's start and end irregularities from the line. The unit is also able to eliminate faulty parts from the strips as pointed out by the operator with a light pen.

The two Pedrini Genesis GS141 sawing machines have a total capacity of 100 square meters of thick slabs per day, which are used for funeral monuments. The swinging system eliminates the dead times at the end of each cutting stroke, significantly contributing to high productivity, Pedrini reports.

JP Granit's owners expect the new equipment investments to not only significantly increase production rates, but to also place the operation at the same level of other major European producers in the marketplace.