Slippery Rock Gazette

Stone PRO Equipment Company knows the secret to developing the best tools for the stone industry.

Owner Barry Brandt said the tools marketed by Stone Pro are developed for use in his own fabrication shop. That’s the key.

“The big secret is actually having to use them day-to-day and make money with them,” he said. “They have to be productive. They have to last without breaking. They have to have a company to stand behind them.”

Finding solutions for needs in his own shop led to products of interest to the wider industry, Brandt said. “Necessity is the mother of invention. If you need something that is not available, you have to create it. We were just developing some products for our own use, and we decided they were marketable.”

The Effingham, Illinois-based company has been in business for 12 years. Prior to that, Brandt founded his fabrication business, Pyramid Marble and Granite, which is still going strong after more than two decades.

Brandt actually owns three companies. “We’re kind of a triple threat,” he said. “We do monuments and memorials, counter fabrication, and we do Stone Pro.”

Working with his wife and two other partners, Brandt serves as lead designer for Stone Pro products. “We get together with ideas, and we engineer some of those ideas together. We also outsource if we need expertise in certain areas. We manufacture some of it and sub some of it out. You can’t make everything, but we try to make as much as we can in-house.”

Brandt has degrees in architecture and engineering from Southern Illinois University. He’s been involved in the stone industry for all of his life. “My father was in the stone business, and I’ve been in the stone business, and my son is in the stone business. He’s the third generation now.”

Although his father retired before Brandt finished college, he did spend years working with his father’s masonry company. “I worked with him all the time,” he said.

Before founding Stone Pro Equipment, Brandt worked in construction settings. “I traveled the U.S. doing stone work on high-rise buildings and things of that nature,” he said.

Pyramid Marble and Granite employs about 42 people. It is Brandt’s fabrication business, which specializes in stone countertops. It’s also the testing ground for the products developed by Stone Pro.

The first Stone Pro product was a diamond wire saw used to cut out holes for sinks in countertops. It has since been discontinued. “We introduced the first support system using rails and cups all in the same year,” Brandt said.

Stone Pro continues to develop CNC tools for the marketplace, he said. “Technology is changing fast with better diamonds for use in CNCs. We have several products now.”

Asked what product he was proudest of, Brandt couldn’t single one out. “Really all of them,” he said. “We have a product out now for our monument division. It’s an automatic sand blaster that cuts the labor and machine runs down a fifth of the time it used to take. It’s probably one of the most high tech products we’ve built.”

Stone Pro’s mainstay product is one of its simplest: the Beaver Chisel, Brandt said. “The Beaver is probably the number that helped make Stone Pro successful. We introduced that, and there have been a lot of companies trying to copy it. It’s such a good product.”

The Beaver Chisel allows anyone to rock pitch perfectly, he said. “It’s really simple. It actually chisels the edge of stone for a rock pitch. I had a couple guys, including myself who could chisel edges by hand, but on thin material, no matter how good you are, there is a risk for breaking corners. It ruins a piece. So we decided to make a machine so it doesn’t do that.”

Other products recently developed by the company include:

• The Stone Pro Seam Vise, a low-cost, permanent anchoring system for seams that outperforms the costlier, clumsier suction cup systems used in many shops. It offers fabricators a means to eliminate costly call-backs due to seam failure on projects.
• The Stone Pro Honing-Polishing Head. Usable on all CNC and radial arm machines, the Honing-Polishing Head is spring-loaded to ensure a constant, even pressure on the face of the stone. It is used for honing, polishing or texturing stone surfaces.

In the Pyramid Granite and Marble shop, fabricators turn to a variety of tools including a saw jet, CNC machines, and edging machines. There is also a photo system for coloring and carving custom images on stone, Brandt said. “We’re pretty much as state-of-the-art as you get.”

What’s next from Stone Pro? “We have a few ideas that we’re working on,” Brandt said. “We have developed some technology to keep diamond tooling in perfect condition through its life-span. There is nothing on the market like it.”

What Stone Pro has developed is an electrical discharge machine, he said. “You use an electrode, and you burn the matrix off the tool so it gets a perfect profile again. You can keep a perfect profile for your CNC machine.”

Instead of trying to patch wear on the tools with a chemical compound, which makes them eventually lose the optimum profile, using his approach can drastically improve their life-span, Brandt said.

“The smaller the diameter of a tool, the faster it wears,” he said. “It’s making more revisions, so it has to do more work. It wears faster, and you lose the contour. We can redress that tool as often as you need to keep in perfect shape, which doubles the life of the tool.”

In addition to the strength of their designs, products sold by Stone Pro have another advantage: a company dedicated to helping its customer understand the best way to use the tools, Brandt said. “The people who copy our products, they don’t know how to tell people how to use them.”