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The company covers central Virginia all the way into Raleigh N.C., now, and Menninger attributes a lot of his success to staying on top of the technologies designed for the industry.
The Cutting Edge
To get the most out of his business, Menninger focuses largely on technology, preferring to utilize more advanced equipment. “We’ve never owned a hand-held router,” he touts. “We’ve never used them.”
The company has invested in an overhead crane system, Moraware job tracking software, FARO arm digital templating technology and a double-bedded CNC machine that allows loading and unloading to go on while the machine works. However, the evolution of the company’s cutting system is, perhaps, the best example of how the company has developed and furthered its reliance on technology advancements.
The company started with a manual bridge saw in 2002, but when capacity dwindled and the company needed to add another saw to its lineup, Menninger invested in a more automated, computer-driven saw. This saw, although not CNC, would allow for more accurate repetitive cuts.
Then, in 2006, Capitol’s cutting systems took another leap when Menninger brought on a Flow waterjet cutting machine.
The timeline for the transition to the waterjet machine took longer than Menninger had anticipated. The waterjet was only running in a less than automated mode for under three weeks, but beyond those three weeks, Menninger said that the machine was in hybrid mode for 30 days. Some jobs were run in a totally automated fashion on the waterjet, and some jobs were still being run completely through the previous sawing method until the automated process could be validated in the shop.
“What we needed to do, and what I did was, we woke up one day and said, ‘That’s it. As of today everything is going to be automated,’ ’’ said Menninger. “That’s when things finally started to come together. You can’t operate in an interim. You have to be one way or the other. You can’t operate a hybrid and that’s what I’ve learned. You have to go one way or the other.”
The sawing systems Menninger first used are still being used for backsplashes and what he considers “non-essential work,” but the basic cutouts are all done on the waterjet. “There were some issues with breakage on quartz products when first getting the waterjet set up,” said Menninger, “but we developed a process of making relief cuts that worked to fix that. Also, we found that, generally speaking, you want to make your cuts from the outside in . . . on the slab in order to relieve stress.”
For the company, the next technological cutting endeavor is purchasing a jet saw, a piece of machinery that uses a saw to cut straight edges and a waterjet to cut radii. The idea behind the jet saw is that the saw operates faster than a waterjet can, but a waterjet can better cut intricate curves. Menninger hopes to make a decision on the jet saw by this summer after, of course, doing his homework first.
