Assistant editor trades computer for ladle and rammer.

A new modern casting staffer gets experience on the floor of a small aluminum foundry.

"Don't worry, we'll make a foundryman of you." That's what I'd been hearing since I joined modern casting last December as assistant editor.

At first, I wasn't sure what that meant. No matter how many foundrymen and suppliers I spoke with, articles I edited, or how enthusiastically I did my homework, I was always aware that there is no substitute for personal experience.

Luckily, the magazine had it covered. Through a long-standing initiation process, new editors are required to ditch the tie and roll up their sleeves for a week of foundry work. So they sent this New York native working in Chicago to Independence, Missouri, for my rite of passage.

The following article is culled from my diary of a couple of days at Superior Aluminum Castings--a great place to learn.

Orientation

7 a.m., Monday--I'm waiting for Superior owner Dwight Barnhard outside my hotel in the new steel-toed shoes that had set off the metal detector at the airport. Despite the hour, the temperature is already in the 80s and plenty humid. They've predicted an unusually hot week for early summer.

Dwight drives up, giving a cheerful hello. He mentions that he's been at work since 6 a.m., so I try to look a little more awake. We head over to the local McDonald's for breakfast.

7:30 a.m.--Dwight gives me the background on Superior as drink coffee. When he bought the foundry 19 years ago, it was little bigger than a store-front. In 1987, operations were moved to a brand new plant was built across town. Despite the added space, Superior remains a small operation.

"We only have 16 associates," Dwight says. "We're strictly a jobbing foundry with around 300 active patterns in part sizes from ounces to 40 lb. We only pour three alloys--319, 356 and 535--and we keep it simple."

The foundry uses olivine molding sand and silica for its shell process and C[O.sub.2] cores. Superior makes 450,000-500,000 lb of castings a year for markets from utility vehicles to health-care equipment.

8:06 a.m.--"Is that it up on the hill?" I ask, pointing to the huge smoke stacks and cluttered yard of a factory. "No, that's a utility plant. This is us," Dwight says. We pull up to a comparatively small brown building with a neatly manicured lawn and a single, unobtrusive dumpster in the back.

Inside, Dwight's wife, Carolyn, smiles hello as she talks to a customer on the phone. The office area is bright and cool, and as tidy as the outside of the plant. Dwight's brother, David (Superior's vice president) hurries by. He says "hi", explaining that they've had a runout in one of the furnaces and he's a little busy.

"We're going to have you sit with Kenny Ashley, our quality assurance coordinator," Dwight says, handing me a hardhat and a package of ear plugs. "He'll go over our safety program and our basic new employee orientation."

8:10 a.m.--Kenny ushers me into a room containing a table, a desk, a counter with some testing equipment, and a VCR on which I watch the AFS introduction video (again), as well as a safety video on lockout/tagout procedures. He goes over the safety booklet with me, along with the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS). He explains the work flow and the job of each workstation. In fact, just about the only thing he doesn't tell me is where to get my W-4 form.

Getting to Work

9:15 a.m.--Superior is deceptively spacious inside. The high ceiling and four large garage door openings offer a bright atmosphere and a constant cooling breeze, making it pretty comfortable in the jeans and T-shirts everyone wears.

"Are you ready to make some cores?" Kenny asks, leading me over to the core room, an open area off to the side marked by stacks of finished C[O.sub.2] and shell process cores. "You'll be making C[O.sub.2] cores for the oil pan of an air compressor."

He takes me through the coremaking process, beginning with mulling the silica and adding the resin. At first, each time I remove a core from the mold, there's a new defect--cracks, pock marks or corners falling off. A slight adjustment of the C[O.sub.2] level improves things dramatically.

10 a.m.--Break time. The whole crew piles out the side door onto picnic tables to drink Gatorade and wipe the sweat from their eyes. A few yards away, a small creek wanders by. Dwight introduces me to everyone before addressing some business.

He tells us proudly that a potential customer had come in the day before and had said that Superior was so clean, he didn't even recognize it as a foundry. "But we can be even cleaner," Dwight says, designating team members to revamp the cleaning checklist for each department.

Before going back to work, he tells me to go over and learn the shell core process "after you clean up your area." Obviously, he's serious about a tidy foundry.

10:45 a.m.--"Venting is my number-one concern in making shell cores," Donny Jones says as he teaches me the process. He explains that adequate venting is crucial to the core quality and how adjusting the temperature and rotation of the machine improves his production rate.

"What's your average production rate," I ask.

"When I run both machines, I do about 100 per day."

The Cooper Chapman shell machine rotates the shell and blows in the sand. Despite this automation, removing the cores from the hot core box makes this a little harder than using the C[O.sub.2] process. The other shell machine is a Beardsley & Piper. Donny runs that one as I work the Cooper Chapman.

12 p.m.--Dwight and I are wolfing down cheeseburgers in his office. On the wall is a chalkboard on which a series of quotes is written ("Quality is never an accident..." "Strive to be the best of the best.") There are also production goals for the year and lists of things to be accomplished. "There's a lot of philosophy in what we do," Dwight explains.

"Our size and lack of resources mean that we have to invest heavily in our most important resource--people," he says. "Things like team-building and individual empowerment help people feel good about themselves and their contribution. For example, our target scrap rate is 3.9%--set by a consensus of the associates, not by me. Everybody in this foundry is on the safety committee, so that everybody feels that safety is his responsibility and he has a stake in it."

Superior has done other things to help develop the human resource. Break times frequently include a motivational video. The company will pay for two classes per employee a year in math or English, just to further skills and knowledge in and out of the foundry. "Technology can only take you so far," says Dwight. "Working smart is the most important thing."

12:35 p.m.--"It was a summer job when I was in college," Dwight replies when I ask how he ended up in the foundry business. "When I started, I was unloading boxcars and running the muller." By the time he bought Superior, he was foundry manager of an iron foundry.

"The main differences between running a shop this size and one of the huge foundries is the number of hats I have to wear," Dwight says. "Small foundry operators are technicians, accountants, environmental experts and even landscapers. We all have a greater number of responsibilities."

Making Molds

1:45 p.m.--"Now, this lever's real sensitive," squeeze molder Don Buazard cautions me. "You just want to move it until you feel it click. Otherwise, it'll drop the mold too hard."

In front of me, a heavy mold of olivine sand is suspended in its flask just above the work area. I'm working the lift to move it into position. I squeeze the lever gently and ... "I guess you missed the click," Don laughs. The mold has fallen three inches onto the work surface. "Is that a big problem?" I ask.

"Well, it could have cracked the mold."

"Is there any way of telling?"

"Yep. Shakeout."

Actually, once the mold is on the line, we remove the flask and, to my relief, there's no crack.

2 p.m.--Three or four Rotolift molds later, I move over to the automatic molding station. The Beardsley & Piper 2016 Match-Blomatic is run by Danny Wilson.

"This machine puts out 100% more molds than I used to do by hand," he tells me. I can see why. With a skilled operator running it, the unit pushes out a completed flaskless mold in under 30 seconds.

Danny makes sure I know what to do. "Don't stand too close because there's an infrared safety beam here that will shut the machine down if its broken," he warns. I get the hang of this pretty quickly, blowing loose sand from the cope and drag, applying parting solution and making sure there is a bottom board ready to receive the finished mold.

2:34 p.m.--Danny leaves me to run the machine until I've filled up the rollers that stretch toward the furnaces. Every time I have four finished, I push all of them further up the line to make room. At 200 lb per mold, this quickly become a tiring endeavor. As I'm pushing one set, Danny tells me that Superior will install an automatic mold-handling system in November, to increase production even further.

Tuesday, 7:26 a.m.--A bright, hot morning, and I'm ready for another day at the foundry. Last night, Dwight and Carolyn took me out for dinner. On the way back, we stopped by the foundry so Dwight could charge one of the furnaces. When he was done, he smiled, saying, "Now that's a task unique to a small foundry owner."

This morning, Dwight tells me he must drive over to Kansas with a load of castings. Add track driver to the list of hats he wears.

"You're going to pour some metal, and then go over to finishing," he says on his way out.

Pouring Aluminum

8:11 a.m.--David and Kenny have removed the crucible from the furnace that went down yesterday. Kenny is standing inside the shell, jackhammering the metal from the lining. The other three electric resistance melting furnaces, made by F.W. Schaefer and Hi T.E.Q., are up and running.

Scott Cutshall, the foundry team leader, talks about the rotary degasser in front of one of them. "This removes the gas and dross that are down in the bath," he explains. "The rest of it we skim from the top." That dross is sent back to the aluminum ingot supplier where it is rendered back into certified ingot.

8:54 a.m.--While they have the crucible out, David and Kenny are making some repairs to the coils on the downed furnace. I walk up and snap a picture and they both jump back a bit, startled by the flash. Standing next to me, Scott chuckles: "Those coils are electric." Of course, the furnace was locked out, but I put my camera down anyway.

9:30 a.m.--It's time to pour. At Superior, pouring is done by hand. David hands me a 20-lb ladle and I dip out of the furnace. Heading for the molds, I realize 20 lb sure feel heavier when they're comprised of molten metal.

"Let your right arm hang down straight so all you have to do to pour is turn your hand," David tells me. "And you can rest the ladle on top of the mold if you need to."

Though my left hand, down near the bowl of the ladle, is feeling the radiant heat through the safety glove, this isn't that difficult. "You just want to keep the cup full as you're pouring," Kenny says.

10 a.m.--Break time. I'm pretty hot and the air is heavy with humidity. We're supposed to get serious thunderstorms by lunch. The local sports section is passed around. For some reason, these K.C. fans find my affinity for the Mets amusing.

10:27 a.m.--David is showing me around the pattern room. "How do you do all your metallurgical testing?" I ask.

"We do thermal analysis and reduced pressure testing at the furnaces," he says. "Our spectrographic and physical testing are done at Stahl Specialty Co. in Kingsville. Stahl is very helpful to small foundries in the area and we have a great relationship with them."

10:45 a.m.--We're shaking out the molds I poured. The molds are pushed off the runners onto a movable vibrating table. The sand falls through it into a trench, where it is conveyed back to a huge silo above the molding line to be tempered and used again. "What about sand reclamation?" I ask David.

"We only use two truckloads of olivine a year," he says. "And even less silica for the cores--not enough to make reclamation economically feasible."

12:20 p.m.--We're sitting in the shade finishing lunch and sipping sodas (when the temperature gets over 90F, Carolyn unlocks the Coke machine in the break room). Once again, I'm the center of curiosity--a N.Y. Giants fan.

Finishing the Job

1 p.m.--I'm hanging around the finishing department, looking over people's shoulders. "You want to give it a try?" asks Dale Fry.

Holding the part against the abrasive belt of the G&P floor stand grinder, I'm a bit amazed that this harmless looking strap can eat away at metal.

I move over to the finishing benches with my part. For the next step, I grind the surface with "the hog," the heavy hand-held grinding wheel. Then I work the Dynabrade around the intricate surfaces inside the casting.

I help Jim Monk load parts into the Viking shotblast chamber, the last step before weighing them for shipment. The cycle takes about three minutes, and makes a world of difference in the finish of the casting.

3 p.m.--Back in the cool of the office, Dwight is educating me on order processing, scheduling, costing and pricing--and the AFSynergy software that helps him.

"This is a great tool. Process and order data for each part is already in the system," Dwight explains. "I plug in the daily production figures and the program updates scrap rates and scheduling balances, and creates a daily profit and loss sheet.

"It's great for a small foundry, or any size foundry, to have this kind of resource. The software provides current management information and frees me for more creative things."

Today's scrap rate is 5.2%. Not bad, I'm told. Dwight will post that rate on a bulletin board for everyone to see--and improve on--tomorrow.

My few short days at Superior proved to be some of the most productive I've spent in my short time with modern casting. There really is no substitute for experiencing firsthand the daily challenges and concerns of foundrymen, as well as their pride in their work and in their product. My thanks to the folks at Superior.