As part of a £1M investment project to provide a Sand Casting Centre of Excellence for our customers at Westley Group’s Stoke facility, a semi-automatic moulding carousel and core-blowing platform was installed at J T Price in September 2013.
Commissioned from foundry equipment supplier Omega, the state of the art equipment has been strategically designed to create a highly-resourced platform for the long-term supply of copper and nickel based sand castings up to approximately 60 kgs. For Francis W Birkett customers, the investment secures the provision of high-quality sand castings to support FWB’s precision machining and assembly facilities in Cleckheaton.
The installation has resulted in a streamlined, semi-automated ‘cold’ moulding process providing numerous benefits for our customers:
Diversity of volume
Ability to manufacture high volume production runs, but also produce 1 offs/samples/prototypes if required
Flexibility to reduce or build volume to suit demand
Large capacity for melting in our dedicated furnace room
Increased output = cost-effective volume production
Capacity to produce 250 to 300 moulds per day on a basic shift, resulting in greater economies of scale and competitive pricing for our customers
Short lead times
Increased productivity and efficiency means shorter delivery times and the flexibility to accommodate urgentbreak-down orders
Geometrical casting production
New generation gassing technique to create cores with superb surface finish, excellent adherence to geometric tolerances, and cores of very high strength
Patterns are able to be made or modified in our in-house pattern shop
Flexibility of supply
Castings can be supplied unmachined or our customers can benefit from our in-house finish machining and assembly service at Francis W Birketts
Full traceability
Laboratory investment and upgrade enabling metallurgical spectrographic control of every melt and compliance with PPAP
Greener process
Sand reclamation through primary and secondary attrition lessens the environmental impact
