Vortex Hydra tile-making machine for roof, floor & wall tiles

Columbia Machine Engineering offers Italian Vortex Hydra tile-making machine

Vortex Hydra S.r.l., the Italian world leader in designing, building and installing manufacturing plants to produce concrete roof tiles is celebrating its 50th year in business this year. During the last half-century, Vortex has helped many building companies and businesses in the production of concrete roof tiles, a product that is relatively unknown in the Indian sub-continent.

In Europe, the concrete roof tile is widely used for several reasons: its aesthetic appearance that enhances the appearance and value of a property; its excellent technical features that enable complete resistance to extreme climates, and it can withstand the ravages of weather and hazards of fire. The tile’s permanent colour is assured, while its unique strengthening property reduces breakage during handling and transportation. It has good insulation characteristics and impermeability with age. Classified as a very environmentally friendly product during its entire lifecycle, the concrete roof tile causes only about 45% of the greenhouse gases triggered by a clay tile.

With a Vortex Hydra tile-making machine, the user can also make floor and wall tiles. The proven technology of extruding a semi-dry concrete mix between a continuous flow of aluminium pallets which pass through an extrusion head, is widely used for roofing siding & floor tiles.

Advantages of Vortex Hydra concrete tile-making machine

Good quality products, high production speed, low operational and maintenance costs, variety of tiles profiles by simply changing aluminium pallets and extrusion tooling, and locally available raw materials.

The raw materials required for roofing tile (size 420x330mm approx.10 tiles/m2) are 3.3kg sand, 1.1kg cement, 30-40grams oxide pigments and water for a tile weight of 4.5kg (this mix can be revised to suit the actual quality of sand and cement).

Vortex Hydra entry-level tile-making machines begin with the UNO Starter Pack which can produce enough tiles to roof a small family house in just 8 hours. The machine is shipped in a 20-foot container which later converts into a curing chamber in which to dry the tiles. It is also possible to buy the kit at a slightly higher price with an extra machine included for making floor and wall tiles at the same time.


The Vortex family of machines progresses with the Uno Evoluzione machinery range. This is the ideal solution for those who want to get started in the concrete roof tile manufacturing business with a low initial investment, and the possibility to easily increase the production capacity up to 4 times more without the need for buying a 100% new line. Uno Evoluzione systems production range varies from 2000 to 16000 tiles per shift.

Vortex wet cast techniques are used to produce high quality decorative concrete products such as architectural stones, stone veneers, ornamental bricks, and brick veneers with different types of surface finishing.