Steel foundries focus on quality.

More than 180 attendees gathered in Chicago from November 14-16 for the 45th Steel Founders' Society of America's Annual Technical & Operating (T&O) conference.

This year was the first time that T&O troubleshooting workshop was held the day before the national conference. The workshop provided an interactive forum among several experts in their field. Speakers were: Charles Bates, Southern Research Institute; and Charles Rowe, Matt Granlund and Rod Duncan, CTA Assoc.

The SCRATA exchange lecture, titled Better Cast Than Fabricated," was presented by Geoff Marston, River Don Castings. He focused on U.K. offshore oil field applications, where castings sometimes are the only option for lifting extremely heavy-structures. Marston pointed out how far large steel castings technolory has progressed and how it is now able to provide cost-effective solutions to difficult design and manufacturing problems.

Process Optimization 

Hal Birkey, Pelton Casteel, discussed the efforts made by Pelton to design for castability and how to sell the idea. The key to customer longevity is to work with customers to design a new part as a casting from the start. This cooperative engineering approach also minimizes part obsolescence, he said.

Carl Sherer, Grede Foundries, Inc., spoke on the attributes of methodizing" (making an idea work). This program requires a positive attitude and involvement of the entire work force in order to run smoothly. The steps involved in implementing ideas are: determine the problem; study present conditions; plan solutions; evaluate solutions; recommend action; follow up and check results. By using this approach, Grede increased its efficiency and capacity.

Plant Equipment

Art Fairson, Frog, Switch & Mfg. Co., discussed their implementation of process controls on their nobake molding line. A sodium silicate system was chosen as a binder system because of its low quantity of mold related defects, minimal smoke and odor during pouring and shakeout and the sand was reclaimable. Five steps were followed to reclaim sand: shakeout, lump-breaking and screening of sand, drying, scrubbing, collection of fines and finally cooling sand for reuse.

Process Development

Mike Gwyn, Pelton Casteel, presented joint work on rapid prototyping using SWIFT software and stereolithography for foundry applications. Rapid prototyping creates model parts directly from a computerized model without tooling or machining. These processes create parts in plastic or wax materials.

With a solid representation of an engineering concept in hand quickly and relatively inexpensively, the customer and the foundry can work out design imperfections, accuracy, casting potential and the ultimate functional capability of the part before committing to any production tooling.

Environment

Various environmental papers were presented on waste management as well as the role of ergonomics and industrial engineering in the foundry.

A presentation by Christina Chan, Pacific Steel Casting Co., focused on how her firm evaluated and installed pollution abatement devices to reduce a community odor nuisance situation. Pacific learned that several of its operations (pouring, mold cooling and shakeout) produced objectionable odors. Two carbon adsorption systems were installed to alleviate the odor nuisance.