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Why Your Company Should Outsource Its Foundry Core Production

By Winnie Ford


A foundry core is fundamentally easy to make. With the right equipment, safety training and a bit of know-how, it can be done in a residential garage. It's amazing what can be achieved with wet sand, a blowtorch and some molten metal. For the hobbyist with no deadlines or production targets to meet, it can be a relaxing and gratifying pastime. If something goes wrong, you can re-use the sand and melt down your mistakes and keep trying until you get the result you are looking for.


If, on the other hand, you are an independent business, there is no time for doing things over until you get it right. If your foundry personnel move on, retire or get sick, you can be up spit creek. When this happens, outsourcing your cores can be the smart move.

Almost 75% of all metal castings are performed using sand. There are a number of different methods for sand casting. Each approach has its own advantages. These methods include isocure, warm box, shell and air set no-bake.

In the warm box process, furan is added to the sand as a fixative and heat provides the catalyst. Furan is a simple aromatic hydrocarbon, colorless. With a boiling point close to room temperature, the liquid is highly volatile and flammable. This is another compelling reason to outsource this work. The cores are heated until the exterior of the core is hard. The interior continues to cool once it is removed from the heat. This process is used to make cores with thin walls because they are resistant to being broken down or eroded by the molten metal.

The air set no-bake process is ideal for complex designs in runs of low to medium volume. The process involves a proprietary mixture of sand and plastic packed around a "positive." The air set method produces castings between 40 and 225 pounds in weight. Another major benefit is that it works with a wide range of materials, including non-ferrous metals, wood, plastic, styrofoam and fiberglass.

In the isocure core-making process, a polyurethane resin is added to the sand. A catalyst, sometimes an amine gas, is injected into the box and superheated air is blown through. This method is fast and economical for large cores.

Sometimes you need a light casting or a fine finish. Here, the shell process is used. In this process, the casting box is heated and pre-treated sand poured into it. In the absence of a catalyst, the exterior is heated to achieve a thin, hard shell. Another cool thing about this method is the sand inside remains uncured and may be poured out and used again.

Metalsmiths have been using the sand casting process for foundry core production for more than three thousand years. This is how our museums became filled with elaborate artifacts from ancient civilizations. Back then, it was a simpler, slower time. Today, not only is there more pressure to produce and produce quickly, techniques have come a long way in five thousand years. They are not necessarily more complicated but they do incorporate more hazardous materials. These are just a few reasons why oursourcing this work is to be recommended.




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