Effective extraction cross draft grinding booths

The granite and engineered stone benchtop cutting business is a relentless one which requires robust, well made machinery. It also needs effective dust extraction units to help make it a safe and healthy place to work in.

The Stone Warehouse factory facility based in Albany north of Auckland is a purpose built site where they fashion their granite and engineered stone benchtops for a range of clients throughout the Auckland region. Bob Nordgren from JOINERS Magazine had a chat with Tony Prime, the Factory Manager for the last four years about the dust extraction system in their factory.

The Stone Warehouse is a family owned business specialising in exotic granites and engineered stone which started back in 1993. Its factory has been on its present site some seventeen years now. In 2005 they had Viking 1978 Ltd, manufacturing engineers and leading suppliers of New Zealand made and assembled dust and fume extraction systems and spray painting booths, manufacture and install a purpose built reverse pulse cartridge filter grinding bay suitable for their extremely harsh engineering environment with all aspects of cutting, grinding and polishing of stone and granite products.

A medium sized system, with a length of 4.5 metres by a metre wide and about 2.7 metres high, this could handle none the less an air volume of some 20,000 cubic metres per hour with a 0.5m/ second face velocity. It has some twenty reverse pulse cartridge filters. This is in fact one of a huge range of custom made cartridge filter booth systems Viking have produced over the last fifteen years.

“It has been a very successful and reliable extraction system,” comments Tony. “The cartridge filters have in fact only been replaced once in the fifteen years we have operated it. It is vacuumed and cleaned out once a month.”

The cartridge booth consists of a top plenum with cartridge filters that are pulse cleaned by compressed air automatically, the lower section consists of hoppers and removable waste bins. A centrifugal fan unit is ducted to the outside atmosphere and is complete with a vertical discharge cowl. Tony comments “The company later had erected a plastic sheet enclosure to contain the harsh environment and help create a cross draft air movement for that entire work area which also works very well.”

For more information contact Ross Metcalf at Viking on 021 760 762, email ross@vikingltd.co.nz or visit their website at www.vikingltd.co.nz

For more information about The Stone Warehouse contact Tony Prime on 09 415 0715, email tony@ stone.co.nz or visit their website at www.stone.co.nz