Phenolic urethane no-bake
Resin-bonded PUNB sand molding to 42″ × 72″ — dimensionally stable for heavy, detailed production castings.
Home / Capabilities
We design the casting and the tooling — then pour it.
We pair traditional pattern and no-bake mold work with advanced 3D CAD, laser scanning and 3D sand printing — and choose the combination that makes your part for the least money. Gray and ductile iron, 50–400 lb.
Where we fit
Built for low-volume production of engineered iron.
A new program generally needs about 10,000 lb a year of a single casting — five tons, a couple dozen to a couple hundred mid-weight parts — for the economics to work. In between is exactly what we’re built for: bigger than an art foundry will touch, more flexible than a high-volume line will bother with.
Below ~10,000 lb / yr
A better-fit process
Below the floor, tooling can’t amortize. We’ll point you somewhere that fits.
10,000–200,000 lb / yr
Our sweet spot
Where tooling pays for itself and our pricing gets competitive. 50–400 lb, gray or ductile.
Above ~200,000 lb / yr
A high-volume line wins
Past this, an automated foundry beats us on price — and we’ll tell you so.
Casting & tooling design
We design the raw casting, then the tooling to make it.
Send a finished-part model or 2D drawings; we reverse-engineer back to the raw casting — draft, shrink, gating and risering, machining stock. Detailing the casting for manufacturability is the foundry’s job, and only the foundry can do it. Bring the part; we make it castable.
- SolidWorks-native — STEP, IGES and Parasolids, or 2D drawings with machining callouts
- Reverse-engineering from a finished part back to the raw casting
- Design-for-castability: wall thickness, draft, shrink, gating and risering
SolidWorks casting model — gating and risers designed inside the mold envelope.
Tooling strategy
We pick the tooling your part actually pays for.
Most industrial castings want hard tooling. A few want a full printed mold. A surprising number land in the hybrid middle — and knowing which is which is the judgment we sell.
Hard tooling
CNC-machined cope & drag patterns — a lifetime set. Best for larger or simpler castings and moderate volumes, and cheap to iterate gating and risers on the test pours big castings need.
Hybrid: hard tooling + 3D-printed cores
Hard-tooled molds plus printed sand cores — and cover cores for complex external features. Skips core-box tooling and consolidates a multi-piece core assembly into a single printed core, eliminating assembly labor and the scrap from cores shifting out of position.
Full 3D-printed mold
The whole mold package printed, no hard tooling. Mold cost climbs with the cube of size — so small or complex castings only, or first-article expediting.
How we choose
Printed-mold cost scales with the cube of size, so for larger, simpler castings hard tooling almost always wins. Printed sand earns its place in the cores — complex cores, and as-cast cover-core features no tooling can make. The lever in every case: design the feature to cast net-shape and skip the post-cast machining. That’s often what tips printed sand past hard tooling.
Traditional + digital
A century of pattern work, run on modern CAD, CNC and 3D sand printing.
We pair the two on every job — and let the part decide the mix.
Explainers
How casting actually works — the short version.
Short, practical reads for the engineer specifying a part. No sales pitch — just how the decisions get made.
Tooling
Hybrid tooling, explained
Core consolidation, cover cores, and when a hybrid of hard tooling and 3D-printed cores beats both extremes.
ReadDesign
Designing for castability
Consistent wall thickness, draft, shrink, and where the gates and risers go — the rules that decide whether a part casts clean.
ReadMaterial
Gray vs. ductile iron
A48 versus A536: when catastrophic-failure gray iron is right, and when a part needs steel-like ductile.
Read The shop floor
Molding, melt and testing — in-house.
Induction melt & chemistry
Induction-melted gray (A48) and ductile (A536) iron, with chemistry verified on every heat before we tap.
In-house testing
Tensile and Brinell hardness testing in-house — castings certified to ASTM specs, no outside lab.
By the numbers
Equipment & specifications.
| Casting weight | 50–400 lb sweet spot |
| Materials | Gray iron ASTM A48 · Ductile iron ASTM A536 |
| Molding | Phenolic urethane no-bake (PUNB), resin-bonded sand |
| Maximum mold | 42″ × 72″ |
| Design | SolidWorks · STEP / IGES / Parasolids · 2D drawings |
| Tooling | Hard (CNC-machined) · hybrid · 3D-printed cores & molds |
| Testing | Tensile · Brinell hardness · ASTM certification |
Already a customer?
That production threshold is about starting a relationship. Once you’re a customer, we’re glad to run the one-offs, prototypes and R&D that come with a real production partnership.
Send us your model or drawings.
We’ll tell you the most economical way to make the part, and whether casting is even the right call. The more you share up front, the faster we can quote.