Investment casting (often referred to as the lost wax casting process) is a manufacturing process that provides an exceptional level of accuracy, enabling manufacturers to make detailed finished metal parts with an excellent surface finish and dimensional accuracy. Investment casting companies supply these parts to members of various industries globally, which tailor to your project needs, and depend upon you to provide the best performance and quality within aerospace, automotive, oil, & bulk industries.
What is Investment Casting?
Investment casting begins by making a wax pattern of the part to be cast. A ceramic shell is placed over the wax pattern and allowed to cure or set so as to form a Mold. The wax is burned out, and the Mold is filled with molten metal and then cooled and solidified, and the ceramic shell is blasted off of the finished part. The investment casting process makes complex shapes and thin wall sections with an excellent surface finish, frequently requiring little to no machining.
Why Choose Professional Investment Casting Companies?
Working with a reputable, established investment casting company provides you with benefits of consistent quality and on-time delivery, plus specialized technical assistance. Typically, these established companies operate state-of-the-art facilities with melting, molding, and advanced finishing technology that enable them to process a variety of alloys including stainless steel, carbon steel, aluminum, and superalloys. Established investment casting companies also implement stringent quality assurance policies and procedures, and often apply X-ray inspection, ultrasonic inspection, and CMM measurements to verify that each part is made consistently within specification tolerances. Their engineering capabilities can also assist customers with engineering for manufacturability, tooling, and material selection to help ensure high performance and/or cost effective options. Multinational investment casting firms often have the capabilities to produce everything from complex, custom prototype parts, to large volume batches of parts for a varied global market segment.
Applications Across Industries
Investment casting is utilized in many different industries and is a well-established manufacturing technique because it provides reliable, competitive quality and performance that can be used for many different designs. Investment casting can make high performance components that must meet exacting specifications in the aerospace industry; for example, turbine blades, engine components and structural components. Investment casting can make reliable, economical and complex pieces in automotive manufacturing too; like, engine manifolds, gearbox housings, suspension components etc. There is also a place for investment casting in oil and gas, because the oil and gas industry need strong valve bodies, pump impellers and drilling equipment components that can provide reliable performance in some of the most extreme environments in the world. In general, investment casting can reliably produce high quality parts for industrial equipment manufacturing, like machine tools, gears, and conveyor parts. These types of products are manufactured using investment casting for a few reasons, which include their lightweight shapes, strength, corrosion-resistant features and dimensional tolerances.
Key Advantages of Investment Casting
Investment casting has a unique combination of benefits making it a good process to realize precision parts across a variety of industries. The design freedom investment casting allows to make complex parts with little or no assembly contributes to innovativeness and flexibility when designing great new products. Regarding materials, investment casting is able to handle both ferrous and non-ferrous metals so the document will satisfy end-user parameters. The investment casting process provides a superior surface finish and therefore minimizes or completely eliminates secondary machining. Investment casting has superb dimensional accuracy; therefore, parts can be made to very tight tolerances that may be required for critical applications. In addition to the lowered material wastes and willingness to save machining time compared to other metal-forming processes, investment casting is an economical process that is valuable to the manufacture.
Choosing the Right Company
Considerations such as experience, industry, certifications, (ISO, AS9100), capabilities, and export compliance are important national and international considerations for an investment casting company. A trusted company will not only make precision parts, but can communicate effectively, deliver on time, and comply with global quality assurance standards.
Professional investment casting companies are strategic partners to industries across the globe. They produce engineered solutions to improve performance while reducing cost and facilitating creativity. Their advanced capabilities and their focus on quality and safety make them a long-term, strategic asset as a partner in modern manufacturing.
