EAGLE PRECISION | INVESTMENT CASTING SERVICES
Stainless Steel Investment Casting and More
Started in 1993, Eagle Precision is an investment casting company based in Muskegon, Michigan, providing casting services including stainless steel investment casting. Our 55,000 square foot manufacturing facility can accommodate a wide variety of part sizes, shapes and alloys.
Eagle Precision’s investment casting services cover the entire investment casting process, from concept to completion. Our sales, engineering and design teams work closely with customers each step of the way, providing our expert casting and machining advice to ensure parts are designed for manufacturability. The outcome is a part that performs to the standards our customers require and is produced as cost effectively as possible. Eagle Precision works under the principles of value engineering (VE).
Our Investment Casting Process
Our commitment to our customers extends beyond delivering exceptional service and superior products; we also prioritize maximizing your investment. To achieve this, our process employs various techniques, such as:
- Identifying key factors that impact manufacturing costs
- Recommending the correct datum scheme to ensure proper part fit and function
- Revealing potential trouble areas in the manufacturing process
- Tailoring the design process to specific project requirements, including:
- Custom tooling and fixtures for efficient production
- Developing models for strategic capital investment
Our Investment Casting Quick Reference Guide
If you’re ready to begin investment casting and wish to know more about our process, our Investment Casting Quick Reference Guide provides all the essential information you need. Inside, you’ll find details on the following:
- Investment casting dimensional tolerances
- Design recommendations
- Characteristics of investment castings
- Size
- Weight
- Surface finish
- Typical quantities
- Full list of alloys poured at Eagle Precision Cast Products, Inc.
Click the below image to download our Investment Casting Quick Reference Guide.
MATERIAL GRADES & SPECIFICATIONS
Our induction air melting process can accommodate most ferrous and non-ferrous grade alloys. Consult our Eagle Precision Cast Products Alloys Chart for our current list of poured alloys, helping you in making informed decisions for your projects. If you’re interested in other materials not listed, feel free to contact us for further assistance.
Stainless Steel Investment Casting
Eagle Precision processes over a dozen grades of stainless steel, including common stainless steel grades like 304, 304L, 316L and 316, as well as high-strength stainless steel grades such as 15-5, 17-4, 410 and 420. We have extensive experience manufacturing stainless steel investment castings from various alloys to provide our customers with corrosion resistance and optimal mechanical properties.
Stainless steel is popular in modern manufacturing due to its versatile and useful properties. Whereas steel is typically an alloy of carbon and iron, stainless steel contains chromium, which imparts exceptional resistance to corrosion and heat and makes it last longer in harsh conditions. The benefits of stainless steel investment casting include corrosion resistance, heat resistance, precision tolerance, detailed design and superior surface finish. These characteristics, in conjunction with its superior durability and longevity, makes stainless steel an ideal choice for a variety of applications.
Investment casting is an ideal process for steel, stainless steel and other alloys with high melting temperatures. The ceramic molds used in investment casting can withstand the heat of molten ferrous alloys, which often approach 2,950 degrees F. Other casting processes, like permanent molding and die casting, utilize reusable metal molds that will deform if exposed to molten alloys at high temperatures, so they are best reserved for lower temperature alloys like bronze and aluminum. However, the investment casting process is highly versatile, and can support nearly any ferrous or non-ferrous alloy, including stainless steel.
ENGINEERING
At Eagle Precision, we offer inclusive investment casting services with upfront engineering support, ensuring high-value parts that consistently exceed expectations. Our robust Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) process evaluates all metallurgical and dimensional aspects of your product, optimizing production efficiency and reducing the risk of potential issues related to the many variables involved in producing a high-quality investment casting. We utilize 3D CAD and MAGMA solidification software (1) to evaluate potential gating schemes for all new or existing investment castings, enabling us to propose design changes and modifications as needed. This approach allows us to coordinate prototypes with final products to ensure the casting will perform correctly, reducing the need for extensive sampling trials and resulting in timely delivery of sound first-article castings.
Our strong relationships with high-quality suppliers also results in broadened expertise in material properties, heat treatment, machining, coating and non-destructive testing. If we encounter design or application-related questions without immediate answers, we have the resources to quickly obtain accurate information.
Before getting started on your next project, we invite you to review our Investment Casting Quick Reference Guide.
Our investment casting design guide provides the necessary knowledge to kickstart your investment casting project effectively.
Should you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for additional information.
METROLOGY
Eagle Precision offers a range of options to measure and confirm accurate dimensional requirements for our products.
We rely on time-tested measurement equipment such as micrometers, height gauges, pin gauges, and specialized go/no-go gauges for verifying critical features and dimensions on production parts.
With our expertise in Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) programming, we can effortlessly measure almost any feature of investment castings to within +/- 0.0005 inches. We use a Brown and Sharpe CMM with PC-DMIS to program and measure up to sixty pieces per hour, providing accurate and detailed capability studies. These studies can be provided for critical dimensions required for PPAPs.
We also use a high-resolution Creaform Exascan 3-dimensional laser scanner to measure and confirm product dimensions on first articles to within +/- 0.0008 inches. This scanner is also valuable if troubleshooting or reverse-engineering assistance is required. By using Geomagic Verify with the scan data, we conduct inspections of critical features and directly compare all of the investment casting’s features to the original solid model design, allowing us to easily identify inconsistencies that could be detrimental to the product’s application.
ASSEMBLY
At Eagle Precision Cast Parts, our investment casting services cover the entire production process, including specialized services for stainless steel investment casting. We provide turn-key assembly services for castings, machined castings and components, and hardware, delivering full or partial assemblies directly to our customers’ facilities, ready for sale to end-users. Contact us today for your next casting assembly project!
(1) The MAGMA Approach, MAGMA
https://www.magmasoft.de/en/solutions/the-magma-approach/