GUYS,
I would also have been in the position of not having heard of this, ie. if I hadn't been given the job of making patterns and coreboxes for this process during one part of my life (probably only for about one and a half years).
I did make the coreboxes, (which were quite complicated in themselves) out of cast iron, but the patterns I made were wooden and the foundry then cast metal working patterns from my wooden masters.
All in all, it was a great experience and although the process is designed more for mass production, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility for a reasonable machinist to do it at home successfully without using the special machine (as described by RONALD) but of course it would be most useful for doing small runs.
As yet I still need to learn about basic metal casting though! - the 'blob' method JKIMBERLIN uses might work fine for me as well!
Cheers,
Will.
Entry Level Casting.
Moderator: Harold_V
Re: Entry Level Casting.
We had both processes in the foundry that I worked, shell molding and investment casting. They are different as shell molding in our case used steel molds in a heated machine and used a resin molding sand. This process also stunk to high heaven when the molds were being cured/made. The machines looked very similar to what
Ronald posted. This process yielded parts that looked sand cast but had tighter tolerances than the normal sand casting.
The investment casting process that we used, is what was described earlier, wax tree (sprue) dipped in a slurry mixture and then dipped in a sand fluid bed while the slurry
is still wet. Then repeat 6 to 10 times. In our case, the mold was made fairly thin and then the mold was placed in a steel container and backfilled with sand which provided
support.
Jim B
Ronald posted. This process yielded parts that looked sand cast but had tighter tolerances than the normal sand casting.
The investment casting process that we used, is what was described earlier, wax tree (sprue) dipped in a slurry mixture and then dipped in a sand fluid bed while the slurry
is still wet. Then repeat 6 to 10 times. In our case, the mold was made fairly thin and then the mold was placed in a steel container and backfilled with sand which provided
support.
Jim B
Re: Entry Level Casting.
JIM,rrnut-2 wrote:We had both processes in the foundry that I worked, shell molding and investment casting.
Jim B
Thanks for a very clear and simple description of both the processes, - better than I could have managed !
