Castings

Metal casting offers OEM designers tremendous flexibility in design, material properties and cost.  Tooling options range from rapid prototypes good for a few parts to intricate patterns capable of hundreds of thousands of molds.  Depending on application, quantity and design/function requirements, The Estell Group can help you evaluate your most cost-effective options.

Sand molding is the most common type of casting process, used for nearly all industrial and automotive alloys (aluminum, iron, steel, bronze, brass, etc.).  Good for very low to high volume, depending on tooling construction. Sand castings will have the highest range of dimensional tolerance, and typically require machining.

TEG foundries offer the following sand-casting options:

Automated green sand molding, best suited for medium to high volume jobs with relatively frequent and repetitive demand:

  • Disa molding center (20X24 flask)) in aluminum alloys 319 & 356, up to 15-20 lb.
  • B&P & Osborne molding centers (16X20 flask) in gray, ductile, and austempered ductile irons up to 40 lb.
  • B&P molding (20X26 flask) in gray, ductile, and austempered ductile irons up to 60 lb.
  • BMM molding (26X40 flask) in gray, ductile, and austempered ductile irons up to 400 lb.
  • North America's largest automated green sand molding center (60X85 flask) in gray, ductile and austempered ductile irons up to 3000 lb.
     

Airset molding, used frequently for prototype parts, large castings, lower volumes or parts with complicated core configurations.  Flexible flask sizes, determined by the parameters of each part:

  • Aluminum castings to 400 lb.
  • Brass & bronze copper alloy castings to 250 lb.
  • Gray, ductile & austempered ductile iron castings up to 10,000 lb.

 

Cope & drag and jolt squeeze molding offer a variety of flask sizes - dependent on part design - in a variety of alloys.  Older and/or lower volume jobs with existing tooling often utilize these processes:

  • Iron casting to 350 lb, with maximum (cope/drag) flask of 30X32 inches.
  • Brass & bronze castings to 200 lb.
  • Aluminum castings to 50 lb.                    

 

Permanent Mold Gravity Chill casting is a very cost effective way to obtain challenging net shapes with reduced machining machining requirements.  Parts can be molded from multiple axes, offering significantly greater design flexibility than standard two-axis sand casting.  Coring and slides can be used to form a variety of complex features, reducing or eliminating machining, particularly considering the consistency and relatively tight tolerances held in the permanent mold casting process.  Assembly costs and tolerance stack can frequently be reduced by combining multiple components in a single permanent mold casting design.

Automation increases permanent mold throughput and process control, and parts are often processed with minimum human intervention until cleaning or machining operations.   Best suited for medium to high volume production, TEG partner Bertazzi & Soldi offers as-cast and machined permanent mold gravity castings in:

  • Aluminum alloys up to 20+ kg, and
  • Copper alloys (nickel, nickel-tin and aluminum bronzes) up to 100 kg.

 

Die casting uses pressure to force aluminum or zinc alloys into high-precision molds.  While tooling is relatively expensive, piece pricing is typically low and machining costs are minimal compared to most other casting processes. Slides are used to form precise bolt patterns or blind holes, reducing machining requirements.  Excellent as-cast surface finish.  Stroh Die Casting offers die castings produced with up to 900 ton presses yielding up to 15 lb castings in:

  • Aluminum alloys 360, 380, 384, TC130.
  • Zinc alloys Z3, Z5, Z8, ZA-12, ZA-27.
  • Magnesium alloys AM608, AM91-D.

 

Investment casting, also know as the lost-wax process, offers the most complex shapes, with a very high degree of precision.  difficult machining and/or assembly operations can be eliminated by design.  A variety of materials can be cast in this process, with TEG partner Milwaukee Precision Casting offering:

  • Steel and stainless steel castings up to 50 lb.
  • Wear and temperature resistant steel alloys (Inconel, Hastalloy, Monel), as well as tool steels.
  • Aluminum alloy (356) castings up to 10 lb.
  • Copper alloy (Al, Mn, Si & Sn bronzes; red & yellow brasses)  castings up to 25 lb.
  • Cobalt alloys CB3, CB6, CB21, CB93.