Urick Foundry is known for its precision castings of complex ductile-iron parts, rapid prototyping, and intricate, machined castings produced on their Disamatic molding machines. Their customers are manufacturers of railroad parts, truck hardware, valves, and electrical insulators. It had been melting in a water-walled cupola with channel induction holding, and made plans to convert to an electric melting system to eliminate some problems relating to the cupola —- and to lower their melting costs.

SandMold Systems Inc. engineered a new delivery and melting system that included two, 12-ton ABB coreless furnaces; two charge cars on load cells; and a hanging, hot-metal monorail that carried the ladles to the holding furnaces. SMS also designed and built the foundations for all the equipment, the structural steel and support steel for the furnaces, power supply, and electrical equipment, and provided installation.

Urick Foundry expects the entire, $4-million addition will realize about $ 800,000/year in reduced melting costs. From design to production, the project was completed in just under six months.

According to foundry director Dan Maytan, “The cost of revamping the existing cupola and bringing it up-to-date would have cost almost a million dollars. By going with the new system, we avoided this cost and eliminated our rising coke and ash disposal cost, which saved another $10,000/month. The biggest saving is the low maintenance requirements on the electric melting system versus the old cupola system.”

“The installation went very smooth and we are very pleased with the results,” according to Maytan.