Glaston Technologies, parent of Tamglass and Z. Bavelloni, held a press conference today at Vitrum in Milan. Pentti Yliheljo, president and CEO, surveyed the current equipment market and said that "Big companies are growing, gaining market share and investing in machinery." He made the point that there is strong demand in the United States, especially for high-output machines.

To capitalize on these points, the Tampere, Finland-based company, introduced new equipment.

Tamglass added the Sonic high convection tempering furnace to its line. It is designed for tempering of super low-E (E=0.02-0.04) products, mainly for IG units and other architectural glass applications. The unit is capable of continuous production of window and patio door glass sizes with 65 percent utilization, according to the company. And this processing has been carried out with a charted optimum super low-E glass processing speed of 33 sec/mm at the highest quality.

Yliheljo agreed that both ends of the tempering market are gaining as people come in at entry level and at the other end the bigger companies add more sophisticated equipment to operate faster and to make better low-E products.

The company's Mauri Leponen said that there have been talks with the big window manufacturers about the new tempering unit and he said it was feasible that one would be in operation in the U.S. within a year.

With bigger customers developing more integrated operations, the company's Kai Appelberg pointed out, more of them are utilizing both Tamglass and Bavelloni equipment.

Stefano Bavelloni then introduced a new double edging and drilling line. It includes the VX EVO double edging machine and the HDM drilling, milling and countersinking machine, an 18 axes CNC unit. The units are available in the MAGNUM series for jumbo size glass sheets up to 3.3 meters wide and 7.2 meters long. He points out that the pre-processing line is "ideal" for processing soft coat low-E glass. All the units are designed to work at the same speed to avoid bottlenecks.

In response to a USGNN question, Yliheljo stated that 40 percent of glass output goes into safety glass, "so this is a growth area." The U.S. market is driven by solar control glasses, he added.