As Dar Marble & Granite celebrate their 25th anniversary, their production of a Jura limestone floor for the international engineering company Fort Vale using laser scanners and CNC processing equipment shows what a forward-looking company the stone specialists are. NSS visited them at their headquarters in Manchester
Making the 30mm thick Jura limestone floors and stairs for the new headquarters of engineering company Fort Vale in Simonstone, Lancashire, was the highlight of four of the busiest years Dar Marble & Granite in Manchester have known in their 25 year history.
Life has calmed down a bit now, courtesy of the recession, but when Dar were approached at the end of August last year to produce the 280m2 floors and stairs for the impressive new headquarters of the international engineering group, they felt as if they were already nearly at full stretch.
They took the job on but had to work seven days a week for seven weeks to meet the deadline of 10 November. Even then, they would have struggled to finish in time without with the use of their latest acquisitions – an Egil saw from GMM and the LT55 laser templater from Laser Products Europe.
David Gray, who set up and owns Dar Marble & Granite, says when they were approached about the job the stone was still in the quarry in Germany.
The enquiry came via stone and machinery wholesalers Pisani, the GMM agents who had sold Dar the Egil and regularly supply them with the granite and quartz they use for worktops.
Pisani gave Fort Vale the contacts for some masonry companies and David believes it was the capabilities of the Egil that helped give him the edge in winning the contract. Without it he might not even have been able to quote for it.
The saw had only been installed at the beginning of last year, having been almost an impulse purchase – in spite of the £84,000 price tag on it.
David explains: “We were in Verona in 2007 – just a general visit. We didn’t go looking for a saw, but at the show they were all going mad for the Egil.”
Dar did not quite buy it there and then. They already had a GMM Techna bridge saw in their workshops that they had been using for five years. They had to re-set it continually because the foundations of their workshop move. The Egil that has replaced it is a monobloc saw so it still cuts straight even when the foundations of the workshop do move.
But Dar were not planning on replacing the Techna – the only part of which they had ever had to change was a bulb in the screen – until they saw the Egil. That made them decide to give some of the fruits of a successful year to GMM and Pisani rather than the Chancellor. And David told NSS: “I must admit, it’s been worth every penny.”
With only 1.5mm joints in the Fort Vale floor and the floor created from radiussed slabs it was essential that the saw should cut straight.
Bryn Gater, of Allyn Stone, who was laying the floor, thought it was asking a lot to achieve such tight joints. David: “Bryn said: it’s not going to work. I said: trust me, it will. And it did.”
When Dar were first approached about the project the developers had been looking for stone specialists with CNC workcentres because they thought it would be necessary to shape the stone using a router. Dar have a Denver Quota CNC workcentre they had bought in 2006 from Mark Brownlee’s agency, Accurite. They use it all the time in the production of worktops and were at that time making 320 vanity units for the Forest of Arden and Northampton Marriott Hotels on it, as well as producing a number of worktops for domestic jobs.
The Egil was also in use, making it possible for Dar to get three tops from each slab using the camera on the saw that allows them to get the maximum amount of finished product from the slab while avoiding any unwanted features. Previously they had only been getting two worktops out of each slab.
Dar knew it would not have been practicable to produce the Fort Vale floor on a CNC workcentre because it would have been too slow. The Egil could do the work in a fraction of the time with millimetre accuracy.
Dar suggested some changes to the design of the floor that were accepted – notably a reduction of the size of the largest units from 2m x 1m to 1.1m x 1m. Even so, they had to buy 400m2 of stone to achieve the 280m2 of flooring needed.
On the first floor level, the stone was laid on a sand and cement screed put down by the teams laying the stone, but at ground level there was a wet underfloor heating system already installed into a surface on to which the stone was to be laid.
David: “It wasn’t flat… are they ever?” He praises the work of Bryn Gater in overcoming the difficulties. “He’s really good on flooring. We use him quite a lot.”
Another technological innovation that helped Dar was their LT55 laser templater from Carl Sharkey’s Laser Products Europe.
They had first seen it on the internet and then again at Marmomacc in Verona. David: “There was this American chap who was demonstrating it. You’re always a bit sceptical about these things. Carl [Sharkey] asked if we would be interested in a demo here in Manchester. When you’re in your own environment you can push them and get the truth.
“We were impressed, so we bought it. It cost £6,500 18 months ago and we’ve more than had our money back out of it.”
After nine months they up-graded from the original palm-held computer that came with it to a more powerful computer that can hold more information, works quicker and can
e-mail the templates back to Dar. Within an hour of templating, the granite or quartz worktop can be in production on the Quota workcentre or Egil saw.
The LT55 software is automatically up-dated from the USA. It was on version 22 of the software when Dar bought it. When NSS visited them it was on version 88 and up-dates come so quickly there could well have been more since then.
“It just keeps getting better all the time,” says Ken Jackson, one of the seven people at Dar (two of the others are David’s sons, Michael and Mark). “I can template a kitchen in about 10 minutes.”
It took more than 10 minutes to template the Fort Vale floor. It was more like a day, although Ken says it was the first time he had used the LT55 on such a complicated project and it would probably take him a couple of hours less now that he is more used to it.
An attachment is cramped on to enable the templater to be used for mapping floor areas, although that is a simple enough operation. What took the time was moving it around the circular area of the floor having first established a centre line through the building. The same centre line was used by Bryn to lay the floor.
You need to understand the principals of setting out a job to be able to use the templater but as long as you have those principals you can learn to use it in a day, says Ken.
The template produced for the Fort Vale floor was given to Tony Barratt, an independent designer, to produce the detailed design for the stones of the floor.
Being sceptical, Tony checked some of the measurements for his own piece of mind. David Gray says: “He was quite amazed when he got back to the office how accurate the LT55 was. He was so impressed.”
A grand opening had been planned for the Fort Vale headquarters on 10 November, but by then the recession had started to bite. Fort Vale had already laid off 40 people and it was not appropriate to celebrate a building that unfortunately now looked a little extravagant.
Nevertheless, it was a fitting project to mark the end of Dar’s first 25 years, bringing together the traditional knowledge of working and laying stone with the productivity of modern computerised machinery to satisfy the requirements of clients.
Dar were set up by David Gray and Roy Hay, now deceased, in an old – “very old,” David emphasises – garage in Chapeltown Street in Manchester, where they used what had been inspection pits as slurry pits for their saw. They used potable water for sawing, a practice they changed less than two years ago when they installed a Denver water recycling plant bought from Accurite. They still use fresh water for the centre of the Quota workcentre but their water bill has fallen from £50-80 a week to less than £250 a quarter.
David and Roy (hence the name of the company) set up Dar having previously worked as labour-only contractors because they were tired of travelling from site to site.
Over the years, David has seen the development of tools and machinery that have facilitated the growth of the granite processing business and he has encompassed them.
When he worked for Pattersons in the 1960s diamond wheels cost £1,000 each (the equivalent of about £15,000 today) and only one skilled man was allowed to use them because they were too expensive to damage. Today, an equivalent wheel costs less than £100.
As well as new machinery, David has seen the rise of the new worktop material, quartz composite, and has also encompassed that. It now accounts for about 30% of his turnover and he is happy to use it because when he buys a slab 3m x 1.4m he knows he will be able to use it all.
He has also seen the sources of granite change with the rise of India and China. He did try buying black granite directly from India but decided it was worth £10/m2 extra to get the quality of material that keeps his customers happy from the depots in the UK of Pisani, Levantina and Ingemar. He does sometimes buy directly from Italy, but using the UK wholesalers enables him to keep his own stockholding down to around £50,000 worth of slabs.