Why an Investment Casting?
The investment casting process offers unique advantages and cost saving opportunities over other metal forming process. Investment Castings provide many advantages such as design freedom, greater alloy selection, close tolerances and better finishes. Most importantly, the investment casting process offers cost savings in machining time, improves reproducibility and reduces assembly time by combining assembled components into a one piece casting. Investment Castings excel at reducing the high cost of machine components and weldments.
Lower initial tooling costs: Initial tooling costs are lower than for most other metal forming techniques. Tooling is produced from an aluminum alloy that is easily machined tp keep the tooling cost low. Prototypes are produced from SLA models so no tollling is requried.
Elimination of material waste: Investment castings are cast to size or near net shape. As a result there is little machining necessary providing savings in time and material costs. Investment castings can be cored to provide additional material savings and weight reduction.
Design flexibility and capability: The Investment Casting Process offers greater design flexibility. Design engineers are now able to develop parts with more complex geometries to satisfy product performance and application requirements.
Design enhancements: Unlike other casting methods, there is no draft requirement in the investment casting process. You are able to easily design components with contours, slots, holes, cored areas for weight reduction and radii.
Consistency: The investment casting process provides a reliable and consistent product. By maintaining highly effective process control programs, dimensional consistency is maintained within batches and from batch to batch
Close tolerances : The Investment Casting Process produces the closest tolerances of any casting process over a wide variety of alloys. Linear tolerances of +- .005 inch per inch can be cast.
Surface Finish Improvement: A surface finish of 125 RMS is typical for steel castings and a slighly rougher finish for aluminum castings. Overall no other casting process produces a finer finish that the investment casting process.
