Metalcasters depend on machinery and equipment providers that understand how foundries work and what qualities they value—precision, consistency, reliability, responsiveness, and so forth. In recent years one supplier went several steps further to show its dedication to customers. Blast Cleaning Technologies installed its own foundry.
BCT designs and manufactures shot-blasting machinery and systems for metalcasting and other manufacturing customers. Its range of products includes blast wheels, parts, and engineered upgrades, and it focuses on providing innovative solutions and high-quality equipment to improve efficiency and reliability in shot-blast operations.
In August 2022, CEO Carl Panzenhagen decided Blast Cleaning Technologies would go further, vertically integrating the production of critical components and processes.
BCT’s 2018 relocation to a 130,000-sq. ft. operation, integrating all of its fabrication and machining requirements resulted in substantial growth, new customers, and innovations that propelled the business into market leadership. The next move, building a new-generation foundry designed solely to produce castings for the shot-blasting process, continued its vertical expansion.
Several factors played into the decision, the most important being a desire to ensure that BCT meets customer requirements for spare parts. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on casting supplies had been particularly challenging.
As early as May 2020, U.S. manufacturers had become desperate to source the parts they needed for their operations, and were working to reshore castings from their overseas suppliers to meet their production requirements. That sudden reorientation of the supply chain quickly tied up the available domestic capacity, particularly for the alloy castings essential for shot-blasting machinery.
At the same time, a tightening labor market was straining the foundries supplying the parts, leaving many of them unable to meet growing demand.
Other critical factors guiding the BCT strategy were casting quality and cost, and the need to ensure casting availability. The ability to innovate with new alloys and heat treatments that provide extended wear life, improved toughness, and better casting fit-up are all focused strategies for our new facility.
A complete do-over
In October 2022, BCT acquired a closed plant in West Allis, WI, and undertook a complete renovation to create a world-class facility. The goal was to establish a site for producing high-quality castings using advanced technology, automation, and environmentally friendly processes. BCT set out to establish a manufacturing location where creativity and innovation would produce better, longer-lasting, and more predictable wear products than any other supplier.
One distinct advantage for BCT in this expansion effort was its work with other manufacturers and their operations surrounding shot-blasting, including foundries but also forging and numerous other manufacturing activities. The highly skilled BCT team designs, integrates, and builds complementary systems that deliver parts to blast systems—which resulted in much of the new foundry being designed and built in-house.
The entire BCT Cast Products facility was designed by BCT engineers, and 70% of the equipment was built by the BCT team.
BCT Cast Products operates two casting lines capable of producing over 8,000,000 lbs. of shot-blasting parts annually, although production in 2025 will be just over 1,000,000 lbs.
The high-throughput, ceramic media no-bake molding line operates at rates in excess of 15 molds per hour, with superior quality due to improved thermal properties versus traditional sand. This improves casting finishes, allows for tighter mold tolerances, and for some alloys it improves castings’ microstructure thanks to faster cooling rates. The ceramic media is also silica-free, eliminating a serious health hazard.
These benefits come at a cost; ceramic media is 40 times more expensive than traditional sand, which is why BCT Cast Products installed a thermal reclamation system to recycle 100% of the ceramic media.
The precision-parts option
The investment casting, or lost wax, molding cell manufactures BCT Cast Products’ precision TwistLOK™ e-Wheel™ components. This process ensures castings with near-machined tolerances and improved fit-up and balance. Components such as blades, control cages, impellers, and housing parts are cast with this process. Even the bare e-Wheel™ is cast this way—the only production shotblast wheel known to be cast by this method.
The process begins with a wax impression attached to a sprue bar and robotically coated with slurry. Mold clusters of two to 20 castings move through a fully automated continuous drying and coating cell. After several coats and drying cycles, the wax is melted out, shells are heated to 1800°F, and metal is poured, resulting in high-precision casting.
To finish the cast parts, BCT Cast Products has installed several BCT blast systems. The no-bake casting line primarily uses a BCT 70-in. table with indexing for operator loading and unloading that removes gating and runners, and executes the initial cleaning of the castings in less than two minutes.
Final blasting of castings from the no-bake line is done on the table or, for smaller parts like blades, in a 6-cu.ft., BCT rubber-belt tumble blast machine.
Investment castings are cleaned in an upgraded BCT 2460 spinner-hanger machine outfitted with a high-efficiency magnetic separation system that separates shot from non-metallics, like sand or ceramic shell fragments. BCT’s magnetic separation system allows BCT Cast Products to clean mold clusters in a complete, ‘shell-removal’ state that is also used by several aerospace customers. This process avoids all manual or water-blast shell removal and achieves complete shell removal. It’s also a low maintenance function.
With BCT Cast Products’ 100% focus on shotblast castings, the foundry’s finishing department was designed to maximize automation. Within the first year of operation, 80% of the casting volume was finished in fully automated robotic grinding cells. The cells include passive pressure readback and vision cameras that qualify each casting.
Manual finishing will still be required for lower-volume parts, and a separate air-conditioned finishing room was create to support the finishing operators.
Achieving vertical integration
BCT’s ongoing effort to achieve vertical integration prompted it to add full tooling build capabilities, including a large 3D printer (48-in. square), CNC router, CNC vertical machine centers, and woodworking equipment for no-bake and investment casting molding processes.
Complementing the tooling capabilities is a 3D scanner that provides full scans of any casting and software to quickly convert the collected data into SolidWorks models and production drawings. In less than 24 hours, BCT Cast Products can scan a customer part, start building tooling, and proceed to production so that in some cases castings are ready within a week, depending on complexity.
BCT is dedicated to ensuring customers have spare parts when they are needed. Its extensive knowledge of shot-blasting processes means thorough support for customers’ systems and needs — covering not only BCT equipment but also machines supplied by other manufacturers, which account for 30% of its casting output. It has the capabilities to support this offering with its extensive technical service and support team, providing high-value-added castings for the industry.
Blast Cleaning Technologies’ focus on vertical integration, innovation, and responsiveness sets it apart in the shot blast industry. The investment in advanced casting, in-house tooling, automation, and rapid prototyping enables it to deliver high-quality wear parts for manufacturers’ shot-blast systems, with shorter lead times. With the largest field service team in North America and support for all brands and models of blast equipment, the metalcasting and machine-building combination is redefining reliability, performance, and customer support across the industry.