What is Steel Casting?
Steel Casting is a type of steel parts made from casting process. Such steel castings are used when iron castings cannot deliver enough strength or shock resistance for application. Main materials of steel castings are: Carbon steel, alloy steel & stainless steel.
Features of Steel Castings:
Machinability: To achieve accurate tolerances and good surface finish, steel castings are often required to do machining after casting. During all the steel castings, carbon steel casting is the easiest part to machine. By comparision, the machinability of stainless steel casting is more difficult for the special material.
Impact and wear resistance: Most steel castings can offer a good balance of strength and ductility, which makes them extremely tough. We usually use alloy steel casting (for example AISI4140) for wear parts in industries like mining, construction, agriculture & forestry (refer to why casting for wear parts).
Used alloys: Steel castings are open to almost all the steel grades for casting. We can even make steel castings according to the material compositions. After finishing of steel casting, just check if the chemical composition of finished part are within the range by chemical analysis.
Production Methods of Steel Castings
Investment Casting is a precision casting process that for small steel castings. With investment casting process, we can obtain close tolerances (CT4-6) and good surface finish ( Ra6.3). Such high accuracy can avoid or reduce machining operation. Typical investment casting methods in China are silica sol casting and water glass casting. The production cost of silica sol casting is almost double than water glass casting, but better surface finish.
Sand Casting is another casting process. Compared with investment casting, this kind of casting process is more widely used for large parts even more than 1ton. But in China, this kind of process can also make small iron castings. Steel castings in this process is made from a kind of sand casting process called green sand casting. After sand casting, the surface is quite rough, so in most cases, steel castings has to be machined.
Kindly remind that when designing steel castings, die casting is not available for its special production process. Die casting could only be used for aluminum, zinc and magnesium alloys.
Steel Castings from China
CFS foundry is one of the top leading company that can supply steel castings in China. We started our exporting business for steel castings since 2003. Many customers purchase steel castings from China for its low prices. As the production cost in Countries like USA, UK, Canada, Australia are really high, especially the larbor cost. Our steel foundry in Ningbo gives us great convenience to deliver goods to our customers for the Ningbo Seaport.
To serve our customers better, we also have an individual machining workshop. When our casting process can not meet the tolerance requirement or surface finish, the steel castings have to be sent to our machining workshop for machining. According to the machining requirements, our production engineer will decide rough machining or precision machining.
We all know that steel castings are easy to produce defects after casting, which can be detected by machining or NDT inspection (MT or X-ray). For these steel castings with defects, for some small defects, we can choose repairing to reduce loss. Of course, these repaired steel castings must conform to the usage standard of our customers, otherwise, they have to be scrapped.
As the representative that produce steel castings in China, CFS foundry mainly supply steel castings to the drawing or sample specification. That is to say, steel castings are made from drawings or samples. Of course, we can also offer redesign service on the basis of old design. For the new redesigned part, we will first provide a sample for testing for free. Then go ahead for large volume production.
Another point that people turn to China for their steel castings, because we do not have quantity limitation. In other words, no matter how many pieces you would like to order, we will supply as required.
Currently, Chinese Government started to carry on the inspection of environmental protection. For this policy, all the steel foundries in China have to stop production momentarily and further impove the working environment to reduce environment pollution. This is a challenge for Chinese steel foundries. But we will continously improve ourselve for green production.
In summary, CFS foundry is your one-stop steel casting manufacturer in China from tooling to casting, machining, heat treatment & surface finish.