Investment casting companies are known for making high quality products for their clients who come from a wide range of industries and sectors of the economy. Industries such as automotive, sporting goods, hardware industries and many others choose investment casting over other processes. So why do they choose an almost ancient process? In this article we will take a look at a few alternative processes and compare them to the investment casting process.
Let’s consider the manufacturing process of making a hammer. Now it would be possible to make a hammer out of a solid chunk of metal, but this process would be incredibly wasteful as a majority of the metal would turn into scrap during the machining process. Not to mention this approach would be far too time consuming and labor intensive, so we can cross machining off our list of potential processes. Forging would be a much more appropriate solution for manufacturing a hammer, however there are still some drawbacks to using forging as a way to manufacture hammers. Though the forging process directional stress could be a consequence of the process and damage the final product, not to mention that the tooling cost for forging can be much higher than that of investment casting. So that leaves us with die casting, surely this process will be better than forging and machining, and it is. The issue is that the die casting tooling process also costs a considerable amount more than investment casting and maintaining the die casting machines can be pretty expensive.
Finally, let’s talk about investment casting. This process is far more attractive than the other processes mentioned because it creates a product that has high quality surface finishes and it comes at a lower cost. The products made from investment casting are highly accurate and can be very complex, all while remaining consistent from piece to piece. If you have any further questions please contact us today and we would be happy to provide you with more information on our investment casting process.