COLD Wax Investment Castings
PMIeng provides investment castings to a variety of industries.
View Cold Wax Investment Castings PDF
Often called Lost Wax, parts best suited for Cold Wax Investment Casting are typically smaller than a shoe box, unless there is a special cosmetic or precision need for IC on a larger part. An aluminum tool is constructed to inject wax into the wax pattern is ejected and assembled together to form a tree full of wax parts.
The tree is then dipped into ceramic slurry, the slurry dries and they are dipped and dried several times to build up a ceramic shell. This ceramic coated tree of wax is then flipped upside down and de-waxed in an autoclave.
The wax melts out while the ceramic is hardened. Now the hollow ceramic mold is filled with molten metal. The features of the mold vacated by the part geometry, becomes the metal parts.
Once the metal hardens the ceramic is cleaned off with a high-pressure water blast and the tree which was once wax is now bare metal. Parts are then either broken off or sawn off the tree.
These parts can be 3 dimensional, and have complex geometry, as slides are often utilized for holes and features, soluble and Ceramic cores can be used to get complex shaped cores. Surface finishes are typically 125-150 RMS and linear tolerances are very good and depend on part feature.