In today’s global market a large percentage of the UK’s manufactured goods come from the Far East, where labour is still relatively cheap.
This is still particularly true where products, such as investment castings, have a large labour content in the manufacturing process.
The Dean Group have invested heavily in the latest manufacturing techniques, in automation and robotics, to try and remain competitive and our UK prices are still the most competitive on a like for like basis. But for larger volume work, the Far East still offer significant benefits for the lost wax process.
The key to success in sourcing from this region is to retain total control of the process parameters and quality procedures and this is where the Dean Group offers the most significant benefits over less technically able sourcing companies. The very reason for choosing the lost wax process for your parts is usually to achieve the very best quality part from a dimensional and surface finish aspect. Investment casting is a highly technical and multi staged process; failure to control any one aspect of this process will have an impact on the subsequent investment casting.
There are a vast number of potential sources in the Far East for investment casting but only a few that can offer the quality and service that we demand in the UK. There are less still that are interested in the smaller accounts. This is where the Dean Group scores again; as we already source a huge range of parts from our supply partners we are able to add relatively small accounts, and offer exactly the same benefits to our range of customers. As one of our supply partner’s largest customers we are able to demand the very best levels of service for our lost wax/ investment castings.

Labels: investment castings, sourcing

DGI have experienced significant growth in demand for aluminium investment castings in the last few months. Aluminium has always been a relatively small part of the UK investment casting portfolio, most of the lost wax casting being in carbon and stainless steel and other non ferrous materials.
DGI have been developing the process for aluminium casting and results are now significantly improved. The quality of investment casting that is now achieved is consistent and of extremely good quality. Minor surface finish issues that were experienced from time to time have now been overcome with subtle changes to the process.
DGI can now offer a wide range of investment cast aluminium parts with full confidence that yield and quality will be as high as other materials that are cast.

Labels: investment casting, investment castings, lost wax process

Conventional lost wax castings are produced using a hollow ceramic shell. The metal is poured in and the mould is allowed to cool, either at room temperature or with forced air cooling. The resultant investment casting was a rather unrefined grain structure so to optimize the mechanical properties of the casting, various heat treatment processes are undertaken. This could be simply an annealing process or may be more involved with parts being soaked at a specific temperature and potentially oil or water quenched. Mechanical properties can be found in the technical section on DGI's web site.

Labels: investment castings

Because the investment casting process can achieve such high accuracy and an extremely good surface finish, fine detail can be incorporated into the design at no additional cost.
With traditional methods of manufacture; fabrications, machined items, even sand and die casting, the more detail you add the more expensive the part becomes.
Investment casting tooling is normally manually assembled and as such a greater complexity is possible. This means that you can incorporate part numbers, company logos and traceability information into the investment casting tooling and even have change pieces within the tooling to facilitate similar but different parts.
Investment castings offer a viable alternative, especially when features can be cast in place that would ordinarily have to be added separately.

Labels: investment casting, investment castings, sand casting

Internal labour costs continue to increase in the UK and many companies are looking to reduce costs by sub contracting simple assembly and packaging, and reducing their work force and overheads accordingly. Automation has been the other option to reduce the labour content but with the current credit crunch, FD's across the land are tightening the purse strings.
There is another simple and low cost option and that is to utilise our low cost sourcing partners, where the parts can be investment cast through the lost wax process, machined, plated and assembled under one roof- and they can be individually packed with part reference information as required.

Labels: investment casting, investment castings, lost wax process