Lasiluoto Oy is a Finnish company founded in 1939 that specializes in building glass such as insulating glass, electrically heated insulating glass, laminated safety glass, roof glass, facade glass, structural glass and interior glass. The maximum size of insulating glass elements is up to 3210 x 5800 mm. State-of-the-art glass processing machines guarantee the best possible cutting and grinding results and the tightness of insulating glass.

Approximately 200,000 m² of flat glass is needed for the annual production of Lasiluoto. The majority (80%) of deliveries go to facade builders and the rest (20%) to small and medium-sized glazing shops. Deliveries are mainly to Finland, with some exports to Sweden and the Baltic countries.

“The operating hours our former seamer integrated in the Lasiluoto insulating glass line came to a full end after a service life of 12 years. Annual maintenance costs became too high and there were too many production interruptions due to failures,” comments Kari Lilja, president and CEO of Lasiluoto.

In addition, the industry has tightened the requirements for edge grinding of glasses, especially for large glasses, rough edge (pencil edge) grinding is required instead of seaming. “It is important for us to keep our quality level high and serve our customers according to their needs, so the decision to purchase a new vertical grinding machine was easy to make,” Lilja says.

The systron vertical grinding machine technology is the best in its field, Kari Lilja was convinced after seeing the machine for the first time during a customer visit to Interpane in Germany in 2018. A representative of Interpane praised the machine as very reliable and superior in serviceability. In addition, glass support and tool cooling with a water bed ensure top quality and capacity without scratching soft coatings.

“Our systron es1 6033 seaming machine has four tools with one tool spindle, which cover almost the entire edge grinding/seaming of our insulating glass production. Glass thicknesses from 4 to 12 mm are ground or seamed according to the customer’s specifications with tools supplied by systronTOOLS.

The tool is changed automatically according to the glass thickness, so there are practically no production interruptions due to the tool change,” says Sami Kuivalainen, Lasiluoto’s production manager.

Operators duty is just to select the grinding method from the machine’s control panel and load the glasses on the line.

“Start-up and training of the machine was done with production glasses within a week, after which the machine was approved and handed over to us. We have survived the first weeks of production with the machine without any issues.

When needed, assistance has come from Austria promptly remotely, sometimes even without a request.

The machine automatically reports fault situations, in which case the remote connection request for service is sent automatically. We have not been left alone, special thanks to the service department of systron,” Kuivalainen continues. “It is still too early to say what level the operating costs of the systron es1 6033 vertical grinder will take over time. To date, the machine has been successful in grinding all the glass fed into it without breaking the glass or other problems. Even demanding shaped glasses have been a great success, and there have been no unexpected production interruptions.”

“In our industry, competition is hard, and quality and delivery reliability often determine the choice of supplier.

With the right machine supplier choices, we ensure that the quality of our products meets or even exceeds our customers’ expectations. We cannot afford to compromise on quality,”

Kari Lilja sums up the current and future challenges in the insulating glass business.