Pedrini: Making the Cut in India

THERKUTHERU, India – An entirely automatic system, equipped with the most advanced technology, is set for the factory here of PRP Exports, one of the major exporters of granite blocks worldwide.
Pedrini Spa of Carobbio degli Angeli, Italy, is already installing a large system, including a cutting department, a resining line, a finishing line for resined tiles and a finishing line for natural tiles.
To ensure top long-term productivity and reliability levels, the Pedrini line is equipped with gauging machines, pre-polishing and polishing machines of the Supernova B065 series using the patented Rotor spindles, along with continuous cross cutting/squaring machines of the System M750 series.
The factory covers a surface of about 12,500 m² that can be expanded up to 22,000 m², and is equipped with a complete system for the production of resined and polished slabs. When PRP Exports decided to diversify and widen its market with new production, namely granite tiles, it turned to Pedrini.
The system includes a cutting department with a topping unit – seven Arco di trionfo M594 cutting centers equipped with automatic unloaders, 16 block-holding carriages and a conveying carriage for a productive capacity of about 4,000 m² per day of 1cm-thick tiles. The block flattening is carried out by the topping unit using specific discs that remove all irregularities on the raw block’s upper surface, solving a block-height problem that usually causes machine downtime.
This solution also allow the carriages to feed the cutting centers with blocks ready for the vertical discs that are subject to lower wear as they operate on flat surfaces. This technology reduces the cost of the diamond discs and eliminates downtimes for the flattening; it keeps a high productivity level, even in case of reduced-height blocks that are less-valuable than large-sized blocks and difficult to market.
The strips coming from the cutting department need an aesthetic/strengthening treatment; the cycle includes automatic loading on the production line, pre-cross-cutting of modular lengths, gauging/pre-polishing, and then automatic transfer on trays of the Pedrini Resinline, which takes care of drying, pre-heating and resining. The trays are then fed into vertical ovens for the resin polymerization.
At the oven exit, an automatic unloader takes the resined strips from the trays and places them on pallets that are then sent to the finishing lines for the final steps of polishing, cross-cutting, squaring, side gauging, chamfering, drying, inspection and packaging of the finished product.
In case of products to be marketed as natural, the pallets of strips from the cutting department are positioned on a second line for all finishing steps, from pre-cross cutting to packaging, after being loaded automatically for the process.