About our New Foundry
Our new foundry is coming in 2025 and will bring with it a world class, state of the art, highly efficient production facility
£18m Investment at the Dronfield, UK site
Increasing capacity by +250/T week
Box size 800 x 600 x 275/275mm
State of the art efficient plant reduces operating costs
180 moulds/ hr
Weight range 10Kg – 60Kg
The Foundry
Savelli moulding process
Improved compaction across the full mould face;
– Cleaner castings
– Deeper pockets can be lifted which may eliminate the need for cores.
– Reduces energy usage by removing the need for running large air compressors.
– Mechanical compaction increases mould hardness & reduces pattern wear.
Both the cope and drag moulding heads have dedicated 2pallet carousels that can be run in various modes with built-in resilience .
Mould closure mechanisms result in precise mould alignment eliminating the reliance on pins & bushes
Melting
3 x 5T tonne furnaces yield a 8.2T/hour of metal availability – resilience through multiple melting units.
HWS auto pour ensures consistent pour control
The cooling track delivers a minimum of 95 minutes in-mould cooling at maximum mould production.
Cores
Core placement stations to have handling arms to improve mould quality
New cold-box core machines being purchased to support additional product requirements.
Shotblasting
Dedicated large shotblast.
De-sprue
In-line wedge method de-sprue
Energy Reduction
Traditional hydraulic operation has been replaced with Siemens electromechanical drives with kinetic energy recovery, significantly reducing operating power requirements.
Passive sand conditioning through Schumacher system.
General Kinematics VIBRA-DRUM®
Damage free parts
After cooling the castings are ejected into a bed of sand and a controlled vibratory cleans & cools the parts.
No additional media is required
Since the parts are not mechanically rotated (as they would be in a rotary drum) there is no risk of any casting to casting contact damage.
Sand Control
The flow from water sprays within the drum are automatically controlled to keep the sand at an average exiting temperature of 70-90°c
Energy Consumption
50% usage when compared to rotary drum
Localised Power Generation
Phase 1
1MWh solar roof array to be installed to effectively cover all net energy usage for plant operation (excluding melting)
Phase 2
Additional solar roof array
Phase 3
Investigation & feasibility study for re-purposing of an offsite plot of land which was historically used for the disposal of waste sand. The potential installation of either a solar array or wind turbine.
