Sand Casting

The best method for casting aluminum is sand casting. The benefits are numerous. Low cost, short time to market, inexpensive tooling, good surface finishes, and several other valuable characteristics. Tooling used in the sand casting process has come a long way over the past years.

Depending upon the complexity of the castings, the tooling is relatively inexpensive compared to a permanent mold or a die cast tool. Most patterns are now milled out of aluminum billet by CNC machines that can hold very tight tolerances…several features of patterns can be held within .005 (5 thousandths). The patterns are machined from the customer’s CAD files which eliminates all errors by a pattern maker.

Since the tooling is machined from aluminum billet, the patterns last through many production runs, literally thousands of pieces. During molding, the sand casting pattern only comes into contact with sand, not metal, which is not true for the other popular casting methods such as permanent mold or die casting. Both the permanent mold and die cast methods, by their very nature, have the molten aluminum run directly into the metal mold itself.

Sand cast tooling can be reworked and can accommodate changes much more easily and economically than can the other methods of casting aluminum. Here at Precision Enterprises, over the years we have experienced at least 25% of existing patterns needing design changes by our customers after sample runs. Most of the time we do not have to start from scratch by making a completely new pattern. We just make the needed changes to the original pattern. This saves our customers a huge amount of money and time.