Stoneworld (Oxford) Ltd was one of the first stone companies to invest in a robot arm. Now it has bought a heavyweight waterjet cutter. And it is happy to use its machinery to carry out contract work for anyone else who wants to make use of the impressive capabilities of this technology.

It doesn’t often happen, but Stoneworld (Oxford) was asked to produce 10 worktops all the same, one for each floor of a 10-storey office development. It gave the company a rare opportunity to compare directly its T&G robot with the waterjet cutter it has just bought, cutting the same product from the same material (black quartzite). Each worktop took seven hours to cut out on the robot and just 22 minutes on the waterjet.

Stoneworld was one of the first stone companies to invest in a robot arm. It bought the Italian HTM version with a Kuka arm that machinery and consumables company Harbro was selling. HTM went out of business leaving Harbro in a difficult position. HTM morphed into T&D Robotics, which offered customers new contracts to maintain the robots and develop the software. It was an offer Stoneworld took up.

Rob Parker, the Managing Director, admits that the whole episode left him with a bad feeling and he is not sure if, given the time over again, he would now buy a robot. But having got it, he is making the most of it. Its forté is carving and he is doing an increasing amount of carving work for some highly distinguished sculptors and cathedrals. Even some of the masonry companies that said their masons could out-perform his robot are now coming to Stoneworld to use the robot.

When Rob bought the robot in 2008, he had started out with the intention of buying a CNC workcentre and had thought about a waterjet cutter as an alternative. He liked the idea of the waterjet but the promise of a robot that could carry out such a variety of tasks attracted him more at that time and he could not afford both.

In the meantime the business that he started in 2002 after leaving farming when it was hit by foot & mouth disease has not only earned him enough to be able to buy the farm he always wanted, it has also earned enough to make it worthwhile investing the £300,000 that the new waterjet cutter has cost to buy and install – although that does include a new £30,000 Cummins 300kVA diesel generator to provide the 400Amps needed for five seconds to get the waterjet started. “The generator could power the whole of Great Milton,” says Rob, referring to the town where his workshop and head office are situated.

He says running the generator is an even greater expense than the garnet abrasive the waterjet is currently consuming at a rate of 750kg a month, although that is expected to increase as the work going on to the machine builds up. The company has been buying Australian garnet but is now testing an Indian material that is £80 a tonne cheaper.

Stoneworld has bought the top-of-the range, 6,200Bar (620MPa) Suprema from Italians Waterjet Corporation.

It was three years ago that Stoneworld made the decision to buy a waterjet when Rob saw Flow exhibiting with the Waters Group at the Natural Stone Show in London.

“We were pretty much down the Flow route but I thought: It’s a lot of money, I’ll look at what else there is,” says Rob.

So he went to the stone exhibition of Marmomacc in Verona, Italy. He looked at the machines of various manufacturers and was so impressed by what he saw on the Waterjet Corporation stand he almost placed his order there and then.

He didn’t. He spoke to Flow again first, but in the end decided he liked the five-axes Suprema best. It has a 4.8m x 2.95m table (working area 3.35 x 1.85m) and can cut through stone up to 300mm thick.

Rob admits it is twice the machine he needs for his current work. But he also knew that once he had bought it, work would expand to fill the capacity and if he did not buy the machine he considered offered him most, he would soon be wishing he had.

It is already paying off. He has had one job which involved cutting 260mm thick York stone and currently has four jobs cutting 50mm thick Raj Green, some on a radius – all jobs he would have turned away before he had the waterjet because they would have been too taxing for his AMS bridge saw, Wells Wellcut and Weha secondary saw.

Waterjets can, of course, cut pretty much anything (not just stone) and Rob does not intend to be limited by having set up his business to work in stone. He has already approached the Formula One racing teams that have their workshops near his in Oxfordshire and steel fabricators that have been using laser cutting. “I have already picked up some business from them,” says Rob. “I want to be a cutting shop, not just a stone cutting shop.”

He believes his background outside the stone industry gives him broader horizons than many of his competitors. “It’s my Cargill upbringing,” he says, referring to the international agrochemical giant he worked for before branching out on his own.

He has gone beyond stone in a small way with the robot, cutting polystyrene sculptures for scenery for the film industry. The robot cuts the material in about a third of the time it takes using a hot wire and because the waste sticks to the head of the machine due to static electricity, it is even easy to clear up afterwards.

Stone World has also supplied natural stone for film-makers. For the TV series Midsomer Murders it supplied standing stones and a replica driveway for a scene that involved blowing up a motorcycle. And in Thor II, when the spaceship lands pushing up the paving, it is real Raj Green paving supplied by Stoneworld that you see as the characters leave the crashed spaceship.

Rob: “There are a lot of companies round here that supply the film industry and we are where they come when they want stone.”

Rob knew from the beginning that it would be important where Stoneworld was situated because he never intended to compete in the more price sensitive parts of the market.

It is a decision that has paid off during the economic downturn, with Stoneworld continuing to grow profitably throughout it – although not without changes.

The company had opened two other depots, which it has since closed, and it has opened a Gallery in Thame, largely for stone interiors. That is in a church which Stoneworld restored and converted. And it was such a good job that it has led to the company now working on the restoration of the Town Hall in Thame.

“I’m happy to take on more restoration work like that,” says Rob. “We have a good team for site work and we have the machinery here that can produce the stone.”

One of the reasons for the new showroom is that Rob’s three children, all girls, are more interested in the design side of stone than the dirtier end of stone production. The Gallery has expanded Stoneworld’s presence in interiors, although the main part of the company’s business remains hard landscaping, which is what attracted Rob to the stone industry in the first place.

These days, a good proportion of what he supplies is for pools and water features for the gardens of millionaires (and even one billionaire). The robot was working on the Woodkirk York stone manhole cover for one such project when NSS visited. The clients wanted a stone manhole cover because they did not want any metal showing. It is part of a 40m long water feature that also has 85tonnes of pebbles and boulders in the water. “It’s a rill,” says Rob. “A very expensive rill.”

One piece of equipment Rob would not be without is his Proliner digital templater. “I have measured out that many swimming pools with it,” he says. “It’s just fantastic; it’s always correct. It’s one of those things: if we didn’t have it we wouldn’t do swimming pools. I didn’t know that was what I was going to be using it for when I bought it, but you buy the kit and it opens up opportunities.

“It’s the same with the robot. It’s now in its sixth year and every year it has done one job that has paid for the whole of that year’s finance on it – and it’s working all the time, so the rest of the time its earning money for Stoneworld.

“With the robot we bought a £25,000 scanner. We used it to scan boulders in Weymouth for the Olympics. It can scan the boulder and work out the centre of gravity, so we knew where holes should be drilled for fixing. We didn’t drill them, but we showed them where they should be drilled. So now we’re into scanning.”

That enables the company to scan maquettes made by artists, scale them up and produce them full size in stone on the robot. It is an expanding business. On one occasion the company scanned an existing sculpture and scaled it down for production on the robot so that scale models of it could be sold in a visitor shop.

The latest opportunity Rob sees with the waterjet is inlaid stonework, but he wants a face polisher to finish it off and has his eye on a Thibaut T108. “I will buy it this year while the Government’s still giving us 20% off with its annual investment allowance.”

Stoneworld has taken a machinery-led approach to the stone industry because it did not have the skills of a stonemasonry background but did have technical skills in Rob Parker’s brother-in-law, Steve Newbury, who now runs the workshop and is able to use CNC machinery to good advantage.

The company employs only 14 people in its factory, offices and the Gallery in Thame. It uses sub-contractors as necessary and transport firms, the cost of which it can pass on to customers, rather than having its own fleet, as it used to.

Reducing its costs during the economic downturn has helped keep it healthy and it is now expecting even better times in the upturn it is already enjoying.

“I hope to keep growing,” says Rob. “Not necessarily by expanding, but by getting better at what we do. Our motto is: Stoneworld for all your stone needs.”