Services • Foundry

Low Porosity Aluminium Foundry

Sarginsons was founded over 85 years ago as a pattern maker but has since evolved into one of the UK's leading aluminium foundries and CNC machinists. It specialises in low porosity, complex, geometrically challenging components using low pressure (including sand), gravity and sand casting facilities.

It's core strategy is to advance the understanding and application of casting technology to push the boundaries of what's possible. This strategy has been hugely successful, with significant advances in lightweighting, environmental alloys, tooling and heat treatment. All culminating in the concept of Freeform Casting which aims to remove all limitations on what can and can't be cast.

Sarginsons uses technology to deliver better, cheaper and more demanding components.

Sand Casting

Traditional and Low-Pressure sand castings are taken to new levels of sophistication by technologies such as Smart Cooling, Intelligent Tooling and the manipulation of mechanical characteristics. These elevate properties in stressed zones whilst providing a viable and alternative short run production channel.

The enormous flexibility that Sarginsons sand casting technology achieves, creates a whole new market by redefining what's possible; particularly enhancing sand cast TYE performance. Alongside this, Sarginsons concept of Intelligent Iterative Design enhances the validity of sand cast prototypes and their utility in improving production components.

An unrivalled ability with sand castings.

Low Pressure Casting

Sarginsons beating heart is its longstanding low pressure casting facility, using hard tooling or sand, which enables it to produce ultra low porosity castings with enhanced mechanical strength, in both production and prototype components. This improved cast performance is vital for accommodating the increasing demand for lightweight and larger, one piece, castings such as automotive sub-frames.

Low Pressure casting is increasingly in vogue as electric vehicles emphasize the need for the light yet mechanically strong components, which is better enabled through low porosity casting techniques. A trend amplified by the drive to ever larger castings, as OEMs seek to drive out cost through merging components.

Sarginsons is a global leader in this field with clients from California to China.

Gravity Casting

A historical strength, gravity casting is the perfect complement to Sarginsons other casting techniques, as it provides an optional low porosity casting solution, for those occasions where low pressure tooling costs are too onerous or production volumes too great.

Sarginsons gravity casting is taken to a new level with Sarginsons simulation and design technology, as it enables gravity castings to attain levels of mechanical strength hitherto thought impossible. With additive tooling techniques producing increasingly organic and geometrically free castings the potential for gravity casting has never been brighter.

Gravity casting is ancient, but has never been more exciting.

Prototypes

Sarginsons has developed technologies to produce mechanically exact pre-production sand cast prototypes, despite the effect of extended cooling rates, of sand castings, on alloy grain structures. This will revolutionize the use of prototypes in validating production castings.

Perfect prototypes are vital to lightweighting and optimised designs, as confidence in the validation of true pre-production components allows designers to more freely challenge design boundaries. These Prototypes are the heart of Sarginsons development of its industrialisation hub which avoids costs and delays of industrialisation.

There is no reason to use traditional prototypes.

CNC

CNC machining of cast components is a specialist skill that requires knowledge, attitudes and industry awareness that normal CNC machinists do not have. Machining to advanced datum strategies, finding single operation solutions or achieving super tight tolerances represent a whole different set of challenges

Group company, Numachine, is a leading machinist of castings. With over 30 CNCs, ranging up to twin-table five axis with a bed size of 1.5m. Numachine is capable of machining any casting but Its true expertise lies in its tooling and fixturing knowledge, which allows it to find novel solutions to the most demanding of problems.

CNC machining of castings demands a different skill set.

Heat Treatment

Whilst heat treatment should be avoided, if possible, by applying other processes, it remains a vital part of a foundries tool kit for enhancing mechanical performance. Sarginsons has been researching heat treatment processes and best practice for some years and has developed techniques that considerably enhance results.

This research has created a number of original solutions for heat treatment issues including adapted orientation, corrective fixturing and at the most extreme, Designed Deformation. The whole has served to dramatically enhance the impact of the heat treatment process whilst countering any negative impact.

Distortion in heat treatment can often be designed away.

Tools, Patterns & Fixtures

Sarginsons started as a pattern maker in 1936, for Spitfire engines, and continues through it's group associate, Pattern Solutions. This capacity complements Sarginsons in house tool design, core making and it's ability, via 3D printing, to manufacture its own fixtures for CNC, Heat Treatment and X-Ray.

Faster turnarounds and alterations are a huge advantage of having such in house skills but, it is the symbiosis of tool and pattern design with simulation and topology that truly tantalises. This potential for geometrically free, de-risked and mass optimised castings offers truly extraordinary potential for cost and weight savings.

Great tooling design drives great component performance.

3D & Blown Cores

Sarginsons has long operated it's own Hot and Cold box core manufacture as a means of enhancing cast component performance, through more complex geometries. It is, however, the potential of 3D printing of sand core and metal tool components, that offers the castings the potential for hitherto unimagined performance.

The promise of new geometric internal and external forms includes features, such as targeted cooling, that not only promise greater dimensional flexibility, but also the potential to improve mechanical performance; potentially negating any requirement for costly and awkward heat treatment processes.

3D printing gives sand cores an exciting new future.

Metrology

Sarginsons metrology department has everything. From ADR enabled X-Rays through spectrographs, tensile testing, laser and CMM measurement. It's the heart and soul of Sarginsons quality, but also the beginning and end of their cutting edge research. Nothing is left to chance with the very latest in technology guiding some of the most advanced and complex casting imaginable.

It's not just the equipment. It's the people. Metallurgists, CADCAM and design engineers, solidification experts, programmers are all vital parts of a system designed to monitor, measure and validate cutting edge research and design.

A truly class facility supported by any number of Universities.