From Kitchen Sinks to Stadiums: Hard Rock Stone Works is on the Rise For Hard Rock Stone Works, the journey from startup to headliner has been an exciting one. Back in 2005, the company began with just a handful of people. Director of Quality Control Bobby Finn has been there from the start. He’s watched Hard Rock rise from a small fabrication shop, servicing Home Depot and Lowe’s, to a company with national reach. “Hard Rock just started becoming one of the future stars in fabrication,” he said. “We like to lead in innovation.” The shop was an early adopter of digital templating. Then, in 2016, the owners of the company invested in a BACA Systems Robo SawJet, which integrates a high-pressure abrasive waterjet and a 20HP directdrive saw with a precision KUKA Robotics industrial robot. “The BACA Robo Sawjet solution is the key to our operations,” Finn said. “We had a gantry-style machine before getting the robot. We implemented the robot, and it immediately became our most important and reliable tool in our shop.” Using the Robo SawJet has doubled the production rate for Hard Rock. “The travel speed on the robot is so much faster than any gantry sawjet would be,” he said. “If you start talking about the speed of using bridge saws and cutting by hand, the BACA Robo SawJet is 4-5 times that.” The standard dual table Robo SawJet allows a granite fabricator to produce a fully cut slab on one table while the other table is being unloaded and reloaded. “The day that robot came into our shop, we became a more productive and reliable facility,” Finn said. The robot reversed the usual production bottlenecks that stone fabrication shops face. “We are always focusing on getting stuff cut so we can get it to production,” Finn said. “All of a sudden we have a machine in the shop that is capable of doing more than we ever expected it to do. Now, our problem is keeping up with the robot by loading and unloading tables fast enough, so the robot can cut the next job.” Hard Rock Stone Works can now pay attention to optimizing other cost-and-revenue metrics, Finn said. “It gives us the ability to focus on other things — how much square footage we’re getting from our CNC machine, how much money per hour our trucks are generating down the road. Things that we, as a granite company, did not have a chance to look at before.”
Robo SawJet Capabilities Hard Rock Stone Works fabricates roughly 10,000 to 15,000 square feet of stone — including countertops and sinks for 20-25 kitchens, plus commercial work — per week. The Robo SawJet can cut a standard 40-square-foot kitchen countertop with sink from a slab within 15-18 minutes, half the time of other machines.