The birth of die casting owes its origins to printing. Making printed copies of documents has been around for thousands of years. At its beginning, highly accomplished artists would carve words or pictures into wood, apply ink to the wood, and press paper against it. The result was an impression of what was carved into the wood with each print being relished as a work of art.
Cast iron, the base metal of grey iron, has a long history that touches every part of the world. The earliest versions of it were created for use as a farm and household implements. Though steel had been invented, it was too expensive for simple farmers. Cast iron, though not as durable, was the affordable choice. In the 5th Century B C, the Chinese used it to make plows and pots. The Europeans discovered its use in the middle of the Renaissance and forged it into cannonballs.
Titanium is one of the most expensive metals available for industrial use, but still, factories all over the world continue to use a large amount of titanium for uses for everything from creating computer parts to manufacturing airplane hulls. So what is it that makes titanium so expensive and why do factories continue to use it?
Titanium investment casting is the process of using a mold to create shaped pieces from titanium. Titanium is used in a variety of applications, although it is most famous for its use in airplanes, spaceships, and jewelry. However, many traditional commercial products have titanium or titanium alloy parts and pieces that help the products work daily.
Steel forgings are one of the main methods used to create steel pats of all kinds. In steel forging, raw iron is slowly converted into steel over a period of several hours and even days. There are a variety of steel forgings methods, but one of the most common methods is the heating and tempering method that is used to create many different varieties and shapes of steel. I had the chance to view the steel forging process recently, and I was amazed at the amount of work and technology that goes into creating basic sheet metal.
Open die forging is the process of shaping metal with the use of heavy pressure dies. The “open” term comes from the fact that the metal is not completely contained while it is pressed into shape. A combination of heavy die presses and shaped bases help form the metal into the desired shape. Open die forging companies make many different pieces of metal using this process, including metal rings, metal hooks, steel rods, and more.
Imagine this scenario. You need groceries, so you decide to head to the grocery store. You’ve got a list of 20 or so items that you need for home. You pull into the parking lot and enter the store only to find that the store offers only one product: evaporated milk. At first you think it’s just an over sized display or a special, but as you walk the aisles, you realize that there is nothing to buy except row upon row of evaporated milk. Needless to say, this store wouldn’t be of much use to you. Grocery stores are valuable because they offer varied products and services. This is true of other kinds of businesses as well, including in the metal casting business.
The casting industry is an essential component in the American industrial machine. There’s no denying the importance of casting to manufacturing, as an extensive variety of finished manufactured parts involve one or more die cast products. Casting is one of the most effective means by which metal products with complex profiles can be created. Just of few of the many possible die casting products include RF housings, bearing housings, compressor bearing caps, lock hardware and even linear actuators.
Wax casting is an ancient casting process that facilitates the process of creating thousands of objects each day. A huge variety of objects are manufactured with wax casting, from toilets to delicate figurines. What many people may not realize, however, is that wax casting is also used to make monuments and statues for decorative purposes, especially for large-scale monuments including war monuments and any other statue with a high level of detail.
Investment casting companies make products for clients from a variety of sectors in the economy. They can make investment cast products for the automotive industry, sporting goods companies and even the hardware products industry. Why do companies choose investment casting over other kinds of metalworking and forming processes? Let’s do a few side-by-side comparisons between investment casting and a few alternative processes.
Less than 200 years ago, metal forging was a family-run industry. Metal forging companies had small shops where families worked together to forge metal. Once the industrial revolution hit in the early 1900s, the metal working industry became in higher demand. Factories had to produce more metal than families could produce on their own, so large manufacturing and forging plants were created to keep up with demand.
Depending on your plans for use, the type of metal forge you employ will not necessarily be the same as everyone else. For instance, companies that created large amounts of forged metal may use a different machine altogether than someone who will maybe only use their metal forge once in a while. Even production numbers fora smaller company lying somewhere in between a factory and a single person could affect the metal forging equipment someone requires.
Die casting professionals need access to a wide variety of casting materials in order to meet the varied needs of their customers. Patrons of die casting facilities could come to those companies with the need for light-weight materials, materials with RFI or EMI shielding qualities, materials that are highly ductile, materials that have high-strength to weight ratios and all kinds of other specific material quality requirements. In order to respond to the diverse needs of their customers, die casting service personnel need to have thorough knowledge of different alloys and the alloy die casting process. This involves knowledge of the metallurgical properties of the materials they will work with as well as the operational details of the equipment they use.
There are a lot of ways to make a metal part. This is because the need for metal parts is varied. That need is varied in terms of the nature of demand for different kinds of metal parts and in terms of the amount of parts that different buyers may need. Different processes lend themselves more or less than other processes to large batch sizes or small batch sizes, profile complexity or profile simplicity and all other factors and variables that are involved in the formation of metal products.
I have always imagined cold chamber die casting to look something like a scene from an old cartoon where the character is suddenly encased in an entire block of ice. I imagined the process froze the metal quickly into the shape of a mold. Of course, this is not really the case. Freezing hot metal suddenly can cause the metal serious stress and even cause breakage in the metal. Cold chamber casing does not have so much to do with adding cold temperatures to the metal as it does with carrying the melted metal from one machine to another for die casting.
The die casting process is used for the fabrication of a wide variety of metal products. However, because not all of these products can be designed using a single die casting method, engineers in the die casting industry have developed variations on the traditional die casting method in order to accommodate the making of die cast products that can be produced only in certain ways. Let’s just quickly go over the most common die casting process. The process begins by drawing molten metal into a casting cavity and then pressurizing it. This pressurization causes the metal to take the shape of the cavity. Then, once the metal has taken its shape, it is allowed to cool and harden again, at which point it is ejected from the casting cavity and sent for additional processing if necessary.
If you were to do a Google image search for “die cast,” you might be surprised by the search results. Instead of cast aluminum intake manifolds, cast zinc faucets or industrial magnesium castings, you’re more likely to see a thousand miniature models of cars, trucks, airplanes, helicopters and even action figures. That’s the difficulty with searching for products on the Internet; it can be hard to know how to ask Google for the results you’re looking for, and it can be even more difficult to sort through the sea of unrelated results that Google sometimes returns.
Investment casting is an old process. I’m not talking old like, two hundred years old, but old like, five millennia old. With five thousand years of development, investment casting companies have a pretty good handle on how to create large amounts of pieces of metal equipment that are consistently uniform in size and shape. It’s a fascinating process that begins with the design of the equipment you’d like to make, then you make a wax mold, add a little fire, and next thing you know, you’re casting! Okay, so it may not be that simple.
Aluminum is a recently-discovered metal that has only been in widespread use for about 100 years. Before the discovery of the best method to purify and extract aluminum from the earth, aluminum was considered a precious metal because of its difficulty to mine and purify. After the invention of the process currently used to purify aluminum, it was able to be placed into constant rotation and became the metal of choice for many uses, including die casing aluminum, aluminum molding, and aluminum spinning.
The process of die casting aluminum using the cold casting method is similar to the hot casting process, but has one major difference. Rather than the metal melting in the same machine as the mold itself, the melted metal is melted in a different machine, then transferred to the die casting chamber via a cold chamber. There are both advantages and disadvantages to the cold casting process for die casting aluminum, but cold casting is usually used with aluminum due to the high melting point of the metal.