Tip Grip

A new customer had a part that required many hours of machining with several setups. Critical machines were required that were also needed for other parts. In addition, the customer had applications that called for 2 different alloys.

Working together the customer and TPM determined which features were critical and beyond the tolerances that we were comfortable to cast. These turned out to be minimal, the small slots on each end and the radial slot that was used to locate and hold the part in the end use. All other features were able to be cast. The most common use for the parts required decent corrosion resistance with good strength and hardness. The alloy chosen was 17-4 (Cb7Cu-1) with H900 aging. The less used application required a much more corrosion resistant alloy – a version of Hastelloy C (CW12MW) was chosen. TPM was able to cast both alloys and use the same wax pattern tooling for both.

The end result is that TPM was able to provide the parts to our customer with minimal machining, reducing the overall machine time by about 24 hours per assembly. This not only freed up the machine centers for other work but more importantly freed up the customers’ best machinists for other work too.