Italian products always win!

With experience, great designers and top minds, motorbikes and machinery. 

Encapsulating Italian-made goods in a single piece of work is no easy task. Three Italian companies – Ducati, Odone Marmi and Breton – have come together to create “Fortitudo mea in levitate” (“Lightness is my strength”).

Ducati (Ducati Motor Holding S.p.A.)

Italy’s most world-famous motorcycle manufacturer. A company that still amazes us, even after 90 years, with its products of peerless style and performance.

Design
Uniqueness
Craftsmanship
Attention to detail
Technology
 Italian verve

Odone Marmi

Master stone and marble workers since 1950, from planning and design through to production and installation.

Breton 

Research, innovation and technology in machines for working marble, granite and natural and engineered stone.

What is “Fortitudo mea in levitate”?

It is a sculpture in white Carrara marble designed by Gianandrea Fabbro, Chief Designer at the Ducati Style Centre, depicting one of the company’s most recognisable models, the Panigale. 

His refined designer’s pencil has given the world the Panigale 1199 and 1299 and now this splendid marble sculpture, an award-winner at Milan Design Week 2015. It was made by Odone Marmi using a Breton Shapemill.

The work was displayed in central Milan for over a week in April, drawing huge admiring crowds outside Audi City Lab in Via Monte Napoleone, at the pulsating heart of the city’s fashion district.

Many people wondered how this gem of technology and craftsmanship could have been made. Today’s machining centres with 5 interpolated axes can create highly complex forms with different materials, including marble and granite, to bring designers’ creativity to life.

The most innovative Italian workshops, such as Angelo Odone’s, choose this kind of machine to turn marble and granite blocks into unique objects, avant-garde furnishing pieces, and veritable works of art. 

The Vercelli-based company produced the sculpture for Ducati. 

“Fortitudo mea in levitate” could only have been made using a Breton Shapemill, the "Ducati" of 5-axis machining and shaping centres for marble and granite, the queen of speed and precision. This machining centre’s impressive performance supports multiple work processes that would otherwise require several machines. Working with various tools, it can mill, turn and perform routing through its shaped tools.

Here is the official video:

 

The Ducati designer and his design, the Odone Marmi factory’s trademark craftsmanship, and Breton technology are the ingredients in a breathtaking work that emphasises the contrast between the lightness of the forms and the weight of the hefty Carrara marble blocks. 

In other words, it is a true celebration of Italian-made excellence.  

That’s all for today.
Thank you for reading.
Until next time.
Bye-bye. 
Sergio Prior

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5-axis machining, breton, Ducati, machining centre, Odone Marmi, Shapemill

The company Marbres&Design chooses "COMBICUT" for its workpieces

Below the highest peak of Europe, Mont Blanc, lies Saint Felix, a town belonging to the French region Rhône-Alpes where one of the most cutting-edge French stone-working companies is located.

Marbres&Design core business is the production of marble, granite, slate and engineered stone for interiors. Aiming specifically to improve its performance, some months ago, the transalpine enterprise integrated its machines with a Breton Combicut bridge-saw, which combines diamond disc and Waterjet cutting.

The group’s gem is its kitchen worktop production range. The main aim of Marbres&Design was to speed-up production and save in wasted material to be able to provide its customers with more and more complex finishes, processing a same granite slab, Dekton or Silestone, with inclined and angled cuts. 

Kitchen manufacturers are always on the lookout for excellent tops, in terms of style and function, which must be very appealing but also very resistant, so it is not so simple for marble masons to satisfy their needs. The designs become more and more sophisticated, with rounded and squared shapes that cannot be cut with conventional mills. This is why a combined cutting station is a must.

“We were looking for a multipurpose machine and we certainly found it” said the owner of the company, Benoit Fleury together with Christophe Rubin. “We are satisfied because Breton’s Combicut has really speeded up our production, also thanks to the worktop change-over accessory” Mr. Rubin confirmed. “The cutting quality is always the same, whether we are processing marble or granite. We are also processing porcelain, ceramic and quartz slabs more and more often”.  

The cutting unit of the Combicut (cutting spindle with disc and Waterjet head) turns around its A axis by ±190° (4th axis): the advantages for its owners are many and precision and cutting speed benefit too.
 

As Christophe Rubin explained, Marbres&Design has configured its Breton Combicut with the innovative automatic worktop change-over system. While the machine is cutting one slab, another slab ready for cutting can be prepared outside the machine, by programming the cutting pattern exactly. Once one worktop has been cut, it automatically changes-over the slabs to be processed, thus guaranteeing increased production rates.

For technical and commercial information on the Breton Combicut, write to: mail@breton.it.
We’ll get back to you promptly.
Thank you for the attention and best regards.
Bye-bye
Sergio Prior

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breton combicut, bridge saw waterjet, cutting granite slabs, cutting marble slabs

Do you work vases and artistic objects? Breton Shapemill is the machine for you!

Hello everybody,
we’re ready for the holidays!
Today I show you a series of photos about the realization of a beautiful vase, on the lathe of CNC working centre for stone Breton Shapemill.

It’s wonderful, true?
Only with Breton Shapemill you can shape complex executions as this vase.
If you’re interested at CNC milling centre Breton Shapemill, at the end of this page you’ll find more works.
For more information on the Breton Shapemill, and prices, contact mail@breton.it.
We’ll get back to you promptly.
Thank you for the attention and best regards.
Bye-bye  
Sergio Prior

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5 axis CNC stone working centre, 5-axes machining centre, breton shapemill, lathe

Machine to shape and polish straight edges MICRON Bellani

Good morning,
Today I would like to show you our shaping/polishing machine Mod. “MICRON Bellani for Breton” at work.
 




 
Here below please find all the specifications of the machine.
For price of MICRON, contact mail@breton.it.
We’ll get back to you promptly.
Thank you for the attention and best regards.
Bye-bye 
Sergio Prior

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edge polishers, Machine to polish straight edges, Machine to shape straight edges, MICRON Bellani

All the benefits of a new warehouse

Breton re-designs its warehouse in collaboration with Ferretto Group. Automated logistics for optimisation of space, flows and processes.

A state-of-the-art warehouse for a virtuous circle of advantages. Breton recently inaugurated its new warehouse. Breton, an organisation deeply rooted in its geographical area and proud to maintain its headquarters in Castello di Godego (Treviso), took a criticality and turned it into an opportunity. With the production shops looking to expand to accommodate rising demand due to the company's constant growth, especially over the past five years, the existing space was simply insufficient (Breton's operates in an 81,000 m2 site). The solution came from the people with a mission of flexibility: the logistics department.                                               
More and more companies engaged in the daily struggle to shave production times and keep up with their delivery schedules with efficient inventory management logic are facing the same basic requirements. Breton looked at ways of reconfiguring its internal layout for wide-ranging optimisation of both the mechanical engineering department (high speed machining centres) and for the stone processing machinery area.

“We started from the need to create more space for manufacturing activities. But we wanted to ensure that this core business area requirement would act as a catalyst to grow and develop the entire organisation” explained Breton Production Manager Massimo Marchioro.

“The manual warehouse we were using was operating at capacity and there was no room to install the innovative systems we needed: we calculated that our personnel were wasting 50% of their time in the warehouse simply moving from rack to rack to find or store items: a wealth of time and energy we had every intention of recouping”. 

Breton found its ideal partner in Ferretto Group. This company, based in the province of Vicenza and specialised in the design and integration of racking, platforms and automated storage systems, gladly took up the challenge to optimise a large number of active part codes in a limited space (more than 170,000 item codes including raw materials and intermediates, from screws weighing a few grams to intermediate products with a mass of hundreds of kilos).

The requirements called for a tailored solution embodying several automation technologies, combining an automated warehouse with stacker cranes and 4 vertical storage systems with drawers and cantilever racks for protruding load units. Assembly work started in May 2013 and we'd already placed the first item of stock in the new warehouse in August of the same year: a record in terms of completion time.

“The automated warehouse is on 7 and 9 levels, with double depth storage bays that can accommodate palletised goods and metal boxes. Overall the warehouse has a capacity of 2,188 load units in just 600 m2” notes Walter Squizzato , who explains the scope of this major Breton investment. “The compact size of the solution allowed us to recover an impressive 1,500 m2 for our production lines. A point of interest? We managed to keep the factory up and running throughout the entire process with no loss of production time”.

The self-loading storage system is fed by three incoming goods bays with touch screen monitors, hand-held barcode readers, and roller conveyors to carry the goods to the stacker crane pick-up station (the physical warehouse and virtual inventory are perfectly aligned). The WMS then allocates the material to the optimal storage bay for the best possible warehouse saturation. The automated warehouse has an input/output capacity of 80 cycles/hour, while the vertical storage systems operate at an average hourly rate of 58 missions.

The automation made it possible to absorb the impact of input peaks that occur especially at intervals of approximately 15 days. Now the majority of Breton suppliers deliver their goods already packed in the automated storage system load unit containers.

Higher productivity and safety, more functional storage and material handling for a fully automatic inventory: Breton's investment is returning value in numerical terms. A few initial perplexities proved to be unfounded. “Innovation has radically changed our way of working. We originally feared that the new warehouse would be unable to offer a sufficient level of flexibility. Now however we all recognise the value of the change... and this is just the beginning: we're ready to exploit new benefits created by this virtuous circle” concludes warehouse manager Omar Mezzalira. 


Technical characteristics of the installed automated storage systems:
Total floor space: 40,000 m2
Logistics area: 1,740 m2
Available height: 10.5 metres
Year of commissioning of current configuration: 2013
Number of loading bays: 2 input + 2 output
Incoming volumes: 2 million pieces/year
Item codes: on average 170,000/year, of which 45,000 automated

-Vertimag Flex vertical storage systems
Number of active storage systems: 4
Height: 14 metres
Type and model of bay: double over/under bay with automatic roller shutter
Number of drawers: 60
Drawer load capacity: 700 kg
Operations capacity: 232 cycles/hour
Maximum peak capacity: 7,424 items in 8 hours

-Self-loading automatic warehouseHeight: 13 metres
Warehouse capacity: 2,188 Load Units
Number of stacker cranes: 2
Number of levels: 7 in block A and 9 in block B
Number of bays: 34 double depth in block A, 33 double depth in block B  
Load units: metal boxes, pallets
Operations capacity: 80 cycles/hour
Maximum peak capacity: 560 items in 8 hours.
Well, that’s all for today, thanks for your attention. 
Sergio Prior

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Breton warehouse, Ferretto Group, Self-loading automatic warehouse, vertical storage systems