Marble Quarry
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Opening a marble quarry is three decisions, not one: whether the stone is worth working, how you free a block from a bedded deposit, and how much of what you free you can actually sell.
This page is written for the person with a deposit and a decision to make, not for someone shopping for a machine. It sets out the sequence of opening a marble quarry, what marble asks for that granite does not, and where our range stops. SET MAKINA has built quarry machinery in Ankara since 1991 and supplies operators in more than 40 countries.
The short version, if you are only here for a minute
- Marble is softer than granite, and our own spec sheets publish the consequence: the same machine drills 40–50 cm/min in marble against 25–35 in granite on a down-the-hole hammer, and 50–70 against 35–50 on a top hammer.
- So drilling is cheaper per metre in marble, and the cut carries more of the extraction. Budget accordingly — a fleet copied from a granite quarry is weighted wrong.
- Three jobs, three machines: prove the deposit (a crawler rig that can reach it), free the block (a rail wire saw plus a column drill for the threading holes), square it (a lighter wire saw, not the extraction machine).
- Marble deposits are usually bedded rather than blockily jointed, which is what decides your block size and your waste, and it is the thing to establish before you buy anything.
- What we do not do: no bridge or multi-wire saws, no chain saws, no gangsaws or slab processing, no block handling or haulage, no crushing, no explosives, no compressors.
How is marble extracted from a quarry?
Marble is cut out rather than broken out. A loop of diamond wire is drawn through the stone to make the vertical and the bottom cuts, drilled holes let the wire pass through the rock to form the loop, and the freed block is tipped off the bench and then squared. Five steps, in this order.
- Prove the deposit. Establish the quality, the bedding, the vein structure and how much of it is workable, before any production machine arrives on site.
- Open the bench. The first face has to be created, which is the one part of marble quarrying that is genuinely slow — there is no free surface for the wire to work from yet.
- Drill the threading holes. A column drill puts a vertical hole and a horizontal hole through the rock so they meet, and the wire is threaded through them to close the loop. The accuracy of those two holes decides the quality of the cut that follows.
- Cut and free the block. Two vertical cuts and a bottom cut with the wire, then the block is separated from the face and tipped under control.
- Square it on the quarry floor. Trim the block to a saleable, transportable shape with a lighter machine, and set the waste aside.
Step 3 is the one buyers underestimate. A quarry working entirely on diamond wire still needs a drill, because the wire cannot start a cut without a hole to pass through — and a hole that wanders is a wire that rubs.
What makes marble different from granite to quarry?
Hardness, and everything that follows from it. Marble gives way faster, so drilling is cheaper per metre and consumables last longer, but marble deposits are bedded rather than blockily jointed, so the bedding decides your block size and your waste. The machines overlap; the economics do not.
| Marble | Granite | |
|---|---|---|
| Down-the-hole hammer, 76–102 mm | 40 to 50 cm/min | 25 to 35 cm/min |
| Top hammer, 32–45 mm | 50 to 70 cm/min | 35 to 50 cm/min |
| What carries the extraction | The cut. Wire does most of the work; drilling threads it | Drilling and splitting carry it; wire takes the free face |
| What limits the block | Bedding thickness and vein defects | The natural joint pattern |
| Consumable load | Lower wear per cubic metre, so wire and bits go further | Higher wear; consumables are a larger share of cost |
The practical consequence. In a granite quarry the drilling units outnumber everything else and the budget follows them. In marble the balance tilts toward the cut, and drilling becomes a supporting trade rather than the main one. Take a granite fleet list, apply it to a marble deposit, and you will have bought too many drills and not enough cutting capacity.
We have written the machine side of this comparison elsewhere, so it is not repeated here: how to choose a diamond wire saw for marble against granite covers the cutting parameters, and the granite quarry page covers the drilling-and-splitting side.
What equipment do you need to open a marble quarry?
Three jobs, and a different machine for each: something that can reach the deposit to prove it, a rail-mounted wire saw plus a column drill to free blocks from the bench, and a lighter wire saw to square them. Buying one machine to do all three is the most common and most expensive mistake.
Job 1 — reach the deposit and prove it
TIGER EXPLORER
Ø45 mm sample, 1,500 mm rod, 15 to 25 m depth, 23 hp petrol engine, 485 kg. Built to be dragged to a deposit that has no road to it yet.
SMART DRILL diesel & electric
28 hp diesel or 15 kW electric, 1,580 kg, 2,300 × 1,100 mm. It takes samples to 40 m at Ø38 mm and then stays on as a production drill if the site is approved.
A crawler undercarriage matters more than it sounds here. On wooded or broken ground, a machine that has to be levelled on a built platform means trees down and soil moved before you know whether the stone is any good. A Denizli producer’s exploration programme turned on exactly that.
Job 2 — free the block from the bench
TIGERFILL
The machine designated for marble: 50 / 60 / 75 / 100 HP, 800 mm flywheel, 3 + 3 m rail, head rotating through 360°, CE marked. Full specification on its own page rather than repeated here.
TIGERDRILL & HORDRILL
76 to 102 mm to about 30 m. TIGERDRILL for the vertical hole, HORDRILL for the horizontal one it has to meet — a vertical column makes a poor job of drilling sideways.
Diamond wire, wedges and hydro bags
8 to 11 mm wire on a high-tensile core. Wedges and air bags separate the cut block from the face and tip it under control instead of letting it drop.
Job 3 — square it without tying up the extraction machine
MINIFILL at 25 / 30 HP with a 500 mm flywheel and 740 kg all in, and MICROFILL at 15 HP, 400 mm and 160 kg total — which splits into a 95 kg rail and a 45 kg console, so two people can move it.
You can square with the extraction machine. You should not: it puts your most expensive asset on the lightest task while the bench waits.
Two power supplies, not one. The wire saws are electric and the drills run on air, so a marble quarry needs both sized before anything is ordered. TIGERFILL draws 70 to 180 A on load, MINIFILL 36 to 45 A, MICROFILL 22 to 24 A on 380–415 V. Bits, rods and shanks are on the drilling tools page; hose, fittings and line lubricators on accessories.
What decides whether a marble deposit is worth opening?
Not the colour. Four things decide it: how thick the beds are, how continuous the stone is between defects, how much of what you cut comes out as saleable block, and whether the site can be reached and powered. The first three are geology; the fourth is why some good deposits stay in the ground.
- Bed thickness sets your maximum block. A bedded deposit will not give you a block taller than the bed, whatever machine you put on it. This is the single figure that most changes a business plan, and it is established before purchase, not after.
- Veins and defects set your recovery. Marble’s veining is what sells it and also what wastes it. A face that looks continuous can be crossed by stained or fractured planes that only show when you cut.
- Saleable recovery is a fraction, not a percentage near 100. Across dimension stone it varies very widely by deposit, which is exactly why a sampling programme pays for itself. We do not publish a recovery figure, because it is a property of your deposit and not of our machines.
- Access and power decide feasibility. Electric wire saws need a three-phase supply at the bench; pneumatic drills need a compressor and a line. A deposit an hour from a road has a different machine list from one beside a substation.
Tell us the bed thickness, the target output in cubic metres per month and what power you have on site, and we will work the machine list back from that. If the sampling has not been done, that is the thing to spend money on first — it is the cheapest decision in the project and the one everything else rests on.
Where our range starts and stops
We make the machines that take a marble deposit from a sample to a squared block on the quarry floor: coring and crawler rigs to prove it, rail-mounted diamond wire saws from 15 to 100 HP, column drills for the threading holes both vertically and horizontally, hand-held and air-leg drills for secondary work, wedges and air bags for separating and tipping, the wire and the bits, and the air-line equipment the drilling runs on. Installation, operator training and on-site technical supervision come with the machines.
What we do not make, so you do not spend time asking. Our wire saws are rail-type only — no bridge or gantry machines and no multi-wire. We do not build chain saws; we contributed to published research on modelling their performance, but we do not sell one. Nothing downstream of the block: no gangsaws, block cutters, calibrating lines or polishing lines, our only processing product being the polishing head. No block handling or haulage — no derricks, gantries, loaders or trucks. No crushing or screening. No drilling above 102 mm, and nothing for water wells, geothermal, oil or gas. No explosives, detonators or blasting services. And no compressors or generators: we size the air and the current you need, buying them is yours.
Questions marble buyers ask us
Is the marble machine actually different from the granite machine?
Barely, and we would rather tell you than let you find out. TIGERFILL is designated for marble and GRANFILL for granite, and on the published specification sheets every figure is the same — the factory issues one shared sheet for both. The only published difference is how wire tension is controlled: PID on TIGERFILL, a PLC on GRANFILL. We do not claim a performance gap between them, because we do not publish one.
Do I still need a drill if I am cutting with wire?
Yes. The wire has to be threaded through the rock to form a loop, which means at least one vertical and one horizontal hole that meet. Those holes set the geometry of the cut, so the drill is not an accessory to the saw — it is what makes the saw’s work accurate.
Does wire cutting need water?
Yes — water cools the wire and flushes the slurry out of the kerf, and it has to be at the cut. This is the exception in our range: on the drills, water supply is an option rather than a requirement.
What power do I need at the bench?
Two supplies. The wire saws are electric — TIGERFILL draws 70 to 180 A under load on a three-phase connection, the smaller machines much less. The drills are pneumatic and need 7 bar with a minimum 5 m³/min per station. Give us the machine list and we will size both.
How big a block can I get?
Your bedding decides that, not our machine. The saw will cut what the rail length and head travel allow; the deposit decides what is worth cutting. If you know your bed thickness, tell us and we will say which machine suits it.
Do you supply a complete quarry or individual machines?
Both. We equip new sites from the sampling rig onward, and we equally sell one column drill to an operation that already knows what it is doing.
Do you make the machines that cut slabs?
No. We stop at the squared block. Gangsaws, block cutters and polishing lines are a different business, and our only product downstream of the quarry is the polishing head that fits other makers’ lines.
Start with the stone, not the catalogue
Send us the bed thickness, what the stone looks like at the face, the output you are planning for in cubic metres per month, and what power and air you can get to the bench. We come back with the split between cutting and drilling, the machine list that follows from it, and both supply calculations. If the deposit has not been sampled yet, we will say so and tell you what to do first.
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