Last month, I drove to Richmond, VA, to check out the new Charles Luck Stone Center. And while I anticipated seeing a new, top-of-the-line stone showroom, I ended up seeing a lot more than that. Taking their cue from high-end retailers such as Gucci, Prada and Armani as well as hospitality experts such as Ritz-Carlton, the people at Charles Luck Stone Center have truly created a stone sourcing “experience.”
No matter how long you’ve been in the stone industry, or what areas of expertise you have developed, you can always benefit from continuing and advancing your education. Fortunately, there is no shortage of high-quality educational opportunities within the stone industry. One prime example of this can be found at StonExpo, which takes place from October 18 to 20 this month in Las Vegas, NV. In fact, an extra day of seminars - with longer, more in-depth sessions - is set for October 17, the day before the exposition opens.
Waterjet Powered by Mitsubishi Electric offers advanced programming capabilities that are an ideal complement to saw cutting and routing, and they enable straight-line cutting for countertops with the added flexibility of radius, reports the manufacturer. Users can preserve accuracy, while achieving more complicated, intricate countertop inlay designs.
The multiple-wire saw range from Pellegrini Meccanica now includes a new model, the Polywire 32. Designed for fast and flexible production, the Polywire 32 allows an operator to cut 32 slabs at a time. According to Pellegrini, this allows the production of three granite gangsaws with a single machine. The block size can be up to 11 1/2 feet long (350 cm) x 6 1/2 feet high (210 cm).
The Park Industries Titan CNC stoneworking center has been engineered as a “high-performance productivity breakthrough in CNC technology,” the company reports. Backed by more than 20 years of CNC experience, the Park Titan was designed for optimal precision as well as premium reliability, durability and support.
As usual, the CarraraMarmotec trade fair included some interesting stone industry analyses when it took place in Carrara, Italy, a couple of months ago. Among them, the show’s organizer, Internazionale Marmi e Macchine, presented the “Stone Sector,” an annual statistical handbook on world production, consumption and trade of natural stone.