Castings

Many applications such as gears, shafts, engine blocks and heads, brackets, racks, hand and power tools, lawn care and hardware, alloy tubes, etc. are cast on a daily basis. Many castings are made with disposable molds of sand for example which once the casting has been cooled the sand mold is broken to retrieve the component. From this point, the component is machined and heat treated using many processes including solution annealing and aging for aluminum pieces and annealing, hardening, carburizing and carbonitriding for ferrous components. Castings, depending on the shape and volume can be processed in batch furnaces such as the Allcase or in a continuous fashion with pushers, mesh belt furnaces, and roller hearth furnaces. Ferrous components are normally heat treated in a protective atmosphere such as endothermic gas and aluminum components are traditionally heat treated in an air or direct fired environment