over to the United States by another company to run its commercial and residential fabrication division of stone. My objective, once I got to the states, was specifically to target, the stone industry and get a waterjet company going.

Campbell: All right. Well, we're still awaiting Terry, so let's just proceed. I'm going to try something that's a departure from previous roundtables. In the past I would ask a specific person a question, but what I want to try this time is to throw a question up into the air for any and all I to answer.

So here we go: why has waterjet cutting in the stone industry taken off so rapidly? What has made it become so popular?

Aalto: Well, it's probably because there is no other way to realize the visions that designers, architects and creative people are having. Certainly from my experience, I ran an ad in dimensional stone seven years ago and I had 700 responses from that, but nobody knew what waterjet was. It just intrigued everybody-but we had no work.

Roundtable Conference: Waterjet Technology - Continued

Continued from

Jonathan Smiga: My background includes a foundation in the arts, in restaurant design work, as well as in business training. The genesis of intarsia was as much, however, the dream of my partner David new who, for 15 years, has been a leading stone craftsman who would make virtual artworks for flooring and other related uses by conventional methods in the true European tradition.

He recognized the waterjet's capability not only to replicate a similar quality of output, but also to add enough repetition in its use so that you could make commercially viable products while at the same time meeting craftsmen standards.

So we've teamed up to do that, and it's been about a year-and-a-half similar to tom's venture. One of the things we like to pride ourselves on is that our primary roots are in the stone trade. We use the waterjet as a toolone of many tools-as opposed to just happening to run a waterjet shop and cut stone from time to time.

We view waterjet as an extension of what David has been doing for the last 15 years, and it's a tool that has enabled us to approach a much broader segment of the market.

Richard Ward: I was involved in quarrying, and actually owned and ran some granite quarries for the dimensional stone industry in southern Africa. As a result, we did a lot of marketing of the products around the world. One of the years, we had a stand at the Verona Fair and the guy in the booth next to me actually had a waterjet from Denmark.

A couple of years after that, I was brought