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As manufacturers we are always looking at ways to improve our product performance and at the same time reduce cost to the customer without sacrificing design intent.  One great way that we have been able to achieve this with our customers is in converting current weldments into ductile iron castings.  

Here are the top 5 benefits our customers have seen in converting a welded product into a ductile iron casting.

1.  Consistent quality:  When a weldment is converted to a casting it takes out the variables that can lead to quality issues in the welding process such as: missed welds, inadequate weld size joining material, precocity and pin holes in weld joints, and inconsistency in weld beads or process.  Since the casting is produced off of the same production tooling over and over there is no process that offers greater consistency of produced parts. 

2.  Reduced Labor requirements:  One of the greatest challenges facing manufacturers today is finding highly qualified welders to fill the demand for our products.  By converting labor intense or higher volume weldments to castings we can free up our capacity to focus our welding resources on less repetitive or more variable products.  This focus of resources allows us to better align our available talent with the requirements demanded.  

3.  Attractive design:  The casting process allows us to design a part that contains unique shapes, features, and curves that make it look more attractive.  Customers notice these nicely designed parts and associate them as being well thought out in the design process and have a respect for the innovation that went into the product.  Customers also associate the use of castings in a product with being the best cost solution so they feel like when they buy a product with castings that they are getting a great product at the best price.

4.  Optimized material usage:  One of the greatest advantages of the casting process is that we can design a part to use material only where it is needed.  Since a casting is not limited like a weldment by starting out with raw material shapes we can put the material where it is needed in areas of high stress and reduce the material in areas where it is not needed.  This allows us to reduce weight and cost in the product by fully optimizing our material usage.

5.  Reduce overall part cost:  It is important to identify the right parts to convert to a casting based on the size, weight, amount of welding, complexity, and volume usage.  We walk through these steps with our customer initially to identify if a casting is the best solution to meet their product objectives.  In most cases we are able to reduce the weight of a part by 15-30% while strengthening the part performance in the design intent.  We are also typically able to reduce the cost of the part by 5-25% along with adding the benefits I mentioned above that we can achieve through the casting process. 

These advantages of using castings makes it easy for us to understand why one of the oldest manufacturing processes is still so widely used today.