Paper drawings get binned as Leica iCON trades helps stonemason Rob go Digital

Getting one cut wrong when the stone is $2000 a square metre is extremely costly!

But if you get the measurement right, it's ‘no worries’ for Australian business owner Rob Fogarty of All About Stone, who is saving time and cutting out mistakes by going from paper plans to digital designs.

He is one of the first businesses in Australia to use the iCON Trades measurement system from Leica Geosystems, and on a visit to his factory in Queensland, he explained to Peter Haddock how it works.

Rob: “A complex job might take over two hours with tape measures, squares and levels. With this, it’s maybe 15 minutes.

“It’s saving me weeks of work, I can quote more jobs now, and I can show my customer the design on the tablet it comes with straight away.

“They’re really impressed as they automatically know they’re going to get a good job. Because the measurements are super accurate and easily transferred to our CNC machine, there won’t be mistakes. It’s speeding up the whole process from quote to finished product.”

Talking about how he uses the iCON trades on his jobs, Rob added:

“It’s quite simple to use once you get used to it. You’ve got this vPen, which has a sphere on one end with special red dots and a point at the other end.

“This links to the Leica iCON iCS20/iCS50 measuring device, which you set up on a tripod in the area you want to measure. You then create a job on the touchscreen tablet and place the vPen at the first point you want to measure.

“Using the small remote control, which I hang around my neck, I can then click to register that point and move on to the next one.

“All you have to do is make sure there is a clear path between the vPen and the main measuring device. With everything recorded on the tablet, you have the design immediately.

“I might do a couple of minutes of touch ups, but then it goes straight into our CNC machine.”