We offer investment casting services with experience, state of the art facilities, and capabilities for all of your investment casting needs. Also known as lost wax casting, investment casting is a multi-step process requiring specific tools and adjustment tools. Small deformations often occur when metal cools and it requires a team with the right experience to keep parts to spec.
Our experienced staff will assist your company, through all of the various stages of the custom casting process.
- Prototype lead times vary from 22 days for simple items to 53 days for complex items
- Create higher quality, more detailed, and greater consistency in manufacturing
- Capacity to handle both large volume runs and small volume, custom runs
- Efficiently combine several welded parts into one casting
- Make parts that cannot be produced by normal fabrication techniques
Casting Process
Metal tooling is made from the customer’s 3D drawings or from a sample part. This is the rst and perhaps the most important part of the casting process. From your request the tooling is built and proong is done to insure correctness. Accurate input is imperative. Simple items require 10 – 12 days, and complex items can take up to 35 days.
Wax injection is the next step where heated wax is injected into the mould which forms a wax replica of the part. Multiple wax replicas are attached to a wax “sprue” or stick to form a cluster.
These clusters of parts are used to make the investments by layering a slurry of stucco and sand. It takes about 1 to 2 days for each layer to harden and typically parts need about 4 to 5 layers.
With the investments ready, the wax is melted out and it’s ready for the molten stainless pour.
Now the part is ready to have the investment shell hammered off. Once the parts have been cut from their sprues and cleaned up, it’s now officially in the “semi-finished” stage. Sometimes we will stock some semi-finished parts for our more popular items to cut down on the lead times.
Now this part will go through machining and welding. Reshaping has also been done at various stages because there are always slight deformations when metal cools to room temperature.
The final stage is cleaning, polishing, and packaging.