Engineering Castings

Iron, in its many forms, often alloyed with other metals and materials has been solving engineering design problems for centuries. The metal became so important that a whole period of history was named after it, The Iron Age, as the use of wrought and forged iron and steel superseded the use of bronze. 

Engineering Castings & Engineering Cast Iron

All of this early use was based on two forms of iron, wrought iron, and forged steel. Wrought iron is a very pure form of iron, commonly 99.9% Fe, which can be heated and forged into shape. Forged steel is basically wrought iron with carbon and silicon added at small percentages. This gives a metal that can still be forged whilst hot but can achieve much greater hardness and strength, particularly when cooled quickly, usually in water or oil.

This opened up whole new areas for use often based around the ability of the harder steel to be sharpened and hold its cutting edges, such as knives and sword blades and in the 13th and 14th centuries, gun barrels.

Cast Iron Production

Little changed in the production and use of forged iron and steel until the industrial revolution. One of the problems up to that point was the difficulty in controlling the amount of carbon and silicon in the iron to give a reproducible and dependable analysis and to be able to get iron hot enough to melt it and cast it. As analytical methods and production process improved, the reliability of the material did so as well. It was also discovered that higher levels of carbon and silicon gave a metal that was very fluid when molten that could be used to cast intricate and complex shapes. This metal was cast iron. It revolutionised the use of iron as an engineering and structural material. Where previously many pieces of wrought iron or forged steel had had to be joined together to form the finished component, cast iron, because of the ability to cast it into almost any shape, could be used to make the component in one piece. This led to savings in weight and production time benefiting Engineering Castings & Engineering Cast Iron applications.

Cast iron became so widespread that it became the metal of choice for the Victorian engineers where a cast component was required that didn’t need the properties of brass or bronze. It was also far cheaper to produce; the basic raw materials of coal, iron ore and water power all being available in Great Britain. Call Durham Foundry on0114 249 4977 to discuss your Engineering Castings & Engineering Cast Iron project.