Why Choose an Investment Casting?

The investment casting process competes with the majority of metal forming processes and offers some unique advantages. The process offers a multitude of benefits including cost savings, design freedom, close tolerances, better finishes, savings in machining time, reproducibility, and assembly savings.

Low initial tooling costs: Initial tooling costs are lower than for most other metal forming techniques. Although most tooling is of aluminum alloy, prototypes can be made by using epoxy or aluminum filled epoxy materials. New techniques in rapid prototyping can provide prototype patterns where needed for evaluation purposes. Tooling costs, averaged over the parts produced, are often lower than other manufacturing tooling costs.

Elimination of material waste: Investment castings are essentially cast to size. As a result there is little machining necessary with consequent saving in time and material costs.

Design flexibility and capability: The investment casting process offers infinite alloy choices, and unlimited design flexibility for external and internal configurations.

Design Enhancements: Unlike other casting methods, there is no draft requirement in the investment casting process.

Consistency: The investment casting process gives a reliable and consistent product. Due to positive process control programs, remarkable consistency is maintained within batches and from batch to batch

Close Tolerances: Investment casting produces the closest tolerances of any casting process over a wide range of alloys.

Surface Finish Improvement: A surface finish of about 125 RMS (root means square) is typical for steel castings. No casting process produces a finer surface finish that the investment casting process.