Engineered Quartz Material Handling
No matter where in the country, or the world for that matter, you have your shop set up, you are going to need specific material handling equipment for quartz. Engineered quartz material handling equipment is a requirement if you want to create quartz surfaces such as kitchen countertops, bathroom countertops, and even other surfaces made from engineered quartz. In this article we will focus on some of the material handling equipment that will make running your quartz fabrication shop easier.
Material Handling and the Supply Chain
So how is material handling related to the supply chain? Simply put, material handling of one sort or another is what makes the supply chain work. Defining "material handling" is not complicated. You can find the definition on
Wikipedia.org. That site explains it inpart this way:
Material handling involves short-distance movement within the confines of a building or between a building and a transportation vehicle. It uses a wide range of manual, semi-automated, and automated equipment and includes consideration of the protection, storage, and control of materials throughout their manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, consumption, and disposal.
Looking at that definition it is not difficult to see how material handling relates to the supply chain. It is also clear in how it fits in with quartz fabrication as well as other materials.
Stone and metal material handling have similarities and differences. Engineered quartz material handling relies on a wide range of equipment, machines and tools. In fact, quartz material gets handled many times throughout the fabrication process. Here are some of the tasks that require a shop worker to handle engineered quartz surfaces.
How Material Gets Handled
Material gets handled throughout the fabrication process. The following is a list of some of the ways in which engineered quartz surfaces get handled and why.
- Removing from Lamination Fixture
- Placing the Quartz On the Polishing Table
- Unloading a Slab from the Delivery Vehicle
- Storing Slabs Until One is Selected for Use
- Moving a Quartz Slab to a Machine for Cutting
- Removing the Material from the Cutting Machine
- Adding the Quartz Material to a Lamination Table
- Loading Quartz Onto the Delivery or Installation Truck
Loading and Unloading Quartz
Vehicles are necessary for transporting fabrication materials including engineered quartz. Putting the slabs onto a vehicle that will be used for transporting the material from one place to another and then removing the slab after the destination is reached are both practical uses for some types of material handling equipment.
Quartz Slab Storage
It might seem countertintuitive to think of storing quartz slabs as material handling, but it actually is one of the ways engineered quartz is handled. Remember, the definition earlier said, "It [material handling]... ...includes consideration of the protection,
storage, and control of materials". So fixtures for storing engineered quartz are actually material handling.
Positioning and Removing Quartz from Machines
Each task in the fabrication process requires material to be handled. In fact, all of the machines used in a fabrication shop must have the quartz slabs loaded, positioned and removed form them. One example is a polishing table. Surface polishing and edge polishing could be done on a machine or by hand, either way, the job is going to be done with a quartz slab laying on a large, flat surface. Getting the quartz onto the surface for the work is what will take material handling equipment.
Many Quartz Products Require Material Handling
We have already stated that it doesn't matter exactly what kind of material you work on, it will require material handling equipment. To highlight that point, we have put together this list of engineered quartz products that utilized material handling gear and information about handling that type of material.
As you can see from the list above, there are numerous products in the engineered quartz surfaces arena. For the most part many of the basics regarding material handling procedures and techniques will be similar but some of them might have variations of how to go about working with the materials.
As we have seen in this article, material handling involves a variety of aspects. Whether you are moving the surface or not, any equipment that supports the quartz slab is considered to be material handling equipment. And with so many different quartz products available, it is not hard to see why material handling plays a big part in the fabrication of engineered quartz.
|
