AFW Foundry Case Story - DISA MATCH
AFW Foundry’s new DISA MATCH has helped increase the quality and speed
of the facility and decrease the scrap rate with 75%.
Small Plant’s Automatic Investment Returns Big Results
AFW Foundry, Lannon, Wis., an aluminum and copper-base green sand caster, wanted to
find a way to update its largely manual shop in order to gain a wider variety of customers
with a wider variety of needs. The company decided to completely overhaul its existing
green sand molding line with a more efficient automatic molding machine that would produce molds faster. Combined with new, automated shakeout, melting and pouring equipment, AFW’s new DISA MATCH from DISA Industries Inc., Oswego, Ill., helped the facility complete its major system upgrade. “It was time to rebuild or replace,” said Brian Gerstmeier, operations manager at AFW.
“Our current system was not able to handle the workload. We wanted the speed of the DISA.”
The DISA MATCH horizontal molding machine was developed for metalcasting facilities with short and varied production runs, such as AFW. Matchplate change is easy and occurs at waist level of the operator, so when it’s time to change matchplates, he or she is not required to lean into the machine.The automatic molding machine also was designed to accommodate existing tooling.
“Customers were skeptical about the new equipment at first because they thought it would mean retooling costs,” said Robert Gerstmeier, president. “But since we were able to use the same tooling without modification, we didn’t have to pass on tooling costs to our customers.”
For this 95-employee metalcasting facility, a lot was riding on the success of the DISA installation. Production on that line had been shut down, and the company took out its only automatic equipment for the overhaul. “When it was time to make the first mold, I gave DISA our most difficult pattern,” Gerstmeier said. “When that machine produced the first mold, all my fears were laid to rest.” With the newly-installed DISA MATCH, which was in production by February, the facility has
seen a marked improvement in quality and speed. The line has produced uncored molds as fast as 140 molds/hour (eventually the facility should reach 160 molds/hour), and in one instance, a mold that had been produced at a rate of 40 molds per hour on the previous system was produced at a rate of 90 molds per hour on the DISA MATCH. Gerstmeier said that the facility’s scrap rate has decreased 75%, as well. He attributes that to the nearly non-existent shift of the molds with the new equipment. “DISA promised mold shift of just 0.25 mm, and they met that promise.”
Written by MODERN CASTING / September 2006