Revolutionising Sand Casting Manufacture with 3D Sand Printing, Innovation and Creativity!

It’s been a fantastic year at Finecast! A year of creativity, forward-thinking, and further investment into the latest cutting-edge technology, including the addition of our new state-of-the-art 3D sand printing centre.

3D Sand Printing allows for product design freedom, flexibility & rapid processing, enabling us to push the boundaries & sand cast extremely complex geometric shapes & structures.

Finecast are now leading the way in sand casting innovation and exploring new ways to optimise sand casting manufacture, producing high precision 3D printed sand casting moulds and cores in-house, ensuring a fast and cost-effective solution for prototyping and low/medium volume series casting production.

3D sand printing provides complete product design freedom and flexibility, enabling us to push the boundaries of mould-making and sand cast complex shapes with ease.

This revolutionary technology enables us to rapidly manufacture moulds and cores faster than ever before and in a low volume scenario it is often more cost-effective than a traditional approach as there is no need for pattern tooling.

3D sand printing allows for mould part consolidation, combining multiple “traditional cores” into one printed piece providing greater repeatability, improved accuracy and supports the realisation of undercuts, complex geometries and thin-walled structures. Complex cores can be manufactured in volume by printing numerous cores in one machine run by multi-layered stacking of printed items.

We can print in various sand media from silica sand to high heat resistance Cerabead® with low thermal expansion, resulting in exceptional accuracy, tolerances and surface finishes in low-temperature aluminium through to high-temperature iron and steels. We are now achieving linear cast tolerances of DCTG7 and surface finishes of 4RA.

3D sand printing provides levels of freedom that go far beyond the possibilities of conventional mould-making, it’s a complete game changer.

There are also significant economic and environmental advantages with the implementation of this cutting-edge technology. By reducing the requirement for costly and time-consuming traditional foundry tooling, as well as limiting the unsustainable disposal of polyurethane resin, we can pave the way for a more sustainable future.

Investing In Our State-of-the-art 3D Sand Printing Centre

During the past 6 months we have been busy developing our new on-site 3D sand printing centre, fitted out with the latest 3D sand printers from Voxeljet, the world’s-leading innovator in 3D printing systems.

We are now pleased to announce that the new 3D sand printing centre is now supporting a range of geometrically complex casting projects for various world-leading companies in the Automotive, Motorsport, Architectural and Defence Industries.

Having a state-of-the-art 3D sand printing centre in-house enables us to provide a rapid one-stop casting manufacturing solution. 3D sand printing is now an integral part of our fully integrated casting manufacturing process including CAD, MAGMA Virtual Simulation, Accredited Material Testing, 3D Sand Printing, Foundry Tooling, Low/Medium Series Foundry, Non-destructive Testing, Heat Treatment, 5-Axis CNC machining and CMM Dimensional Validation.

Advantages of 3D Sand Printing Moulds & Cores

Breaking Boundaries

Our latest breakthrough came when we were commissioned to manufacture a range of complex impeller pump castings.

For the past 20+ years, these particularly intricate impeller pump castings have been manufactured using the lost wax casting method, which was complex, time-consuming and very expensive to manufacture.

So, the question came to mind “Could the numerous complex cores be 3D sand printed as one single piece, by doing so, could we improve repeatability, accuracy, tolerance, surface finish and accelerate time to market?”

There is no job too difficult for our specialist metallurgists and method engineers, who on thrive on pushing the boundaries of sand casting manufacture. They got to work and their creative minds began to re-engineer a new mould pack design and run virtual casting simulations. Once confident with the mould pack design, we began the manufacture of the impeller pump castings following our advanced manufacturing process.

Not only did we consolidate mould cores and print in one single piece, we were also able to achieve a mind-blowing min-wall thickness of 1.5mm, a casting tolerance of DCTG7, a superfine surface finish of 5-6RA while maintaining the highest integrity, meeting the client’s strict specification and lead time requirements. Take a look at our fully integrated, in-house advanced manufacturing process below.

Complete In-house Manufacturing Process

Mould Production Lead Time Comparison

As you can see from the comparison chart (left) mould production time is considerably reduced.

Customers can benefit from fast turnaround cost-effectiveness and flexibility to implement design changes.

In the case of the complex impeller castings, we can now sand print the mould in 3 days, faster than traditional pattern making which would take 21 days and Lost Wax taking 35 days.

3D printing eliminates the need for pattern making, as well as draft angles on the mould.

Having the 3D sand printing centre on-site allows us to offer a fully integrated service – the ability to offer an extremely fast and efficient way to manufacture complex castings.