"Nice, but there are other rapid processes. We can use them and save some money"


• This is a good point. If your customers find other processes acceptable we recommend using them. If however, accuracy and detail are required for a specific order, you may want to explore our service. Differentiation in quality seems to be the key factor in gaining repeat clientele both for us, and our investment casting partners.

"We couldn't buy Rapid-Cast castings and still be profitable."
• This might be the case. It depends on the job. The answer comes down to comparing the cost of Rapid-Cast parts with the cost of creating them conventionally. Rapid-Cast parts win in time and in cost when small complex geometries or highly detailed parts are required prior to final tool design determination. It does not win on simple, or large castings. Your experience best dictates when and if we should be called for that particular job. (please see following article)



If you make a large, simple straight pull molds this service may not be for you. But for any work orders that call for smaller (less than 3"), highly detailed parts or those with complex geometries it may make a great deal of sense. Our greatest success is with a loyal contingency of customers that see where and when our service is of value.

"Ok, but why not use other processes. They're faster and sometimes cheaper."
• Just as rough-are quicker to create than precise quality molds, this level of accuracy and attention to detail requires time. Our focus has not been on comparing our speeds to competitive processes, but on producing the quality in castings that your industry expects. clients in the investment casting industry have found this trade off acceptable. We have been successful at providing precision castings firms with prototype, preproduction and full production patterns for over nine years.

While the tool is being completed.

Coastcast, Rapid-Cast, cooperate in creating parts used as casting patterns for pre-production artificial heart

When Coastcast was approached by Canada’s World Heart Corporation (WorldHeart) about producing prototype titanium castings for a ventricular assist device (VAD) it quickly decided that rapid prototyping was the only way it could produce high quality patterns in time to meet WorldHeart’s deadline.
A ventricular assist device is an auxiliary pump designed to provide long-term support for people suffering form heart failure. In the past, VADs have been bulky units that have required patients to be hooked up to external pumps or power supplies. WorldHeart Corporation, based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is developing the first fully implantable VAD and needed titanium castings for laboratory testing.
According to WorldHeart, the new HeartSaver VADTM will offer lifesaving benefits to thousands of cardiac patients whose only previous hope might have been heart transplants. Similar in size to a natural heart and weighing approximately 500 grams, the HeartSaver VADTM is designed to be implanted in the chest cavity to assist a damaged or poorly functioning heart. Power to the device is transferred through the patient’s skin and tissue so that no permanent body openings are required, and a custom-designed microchip allows the device to be remotely monitored or even controlled through a telephone line.
WorldHeart came to Coastcast, a public company with two foundries in the United States and six in Mexico, because of Coastcast’s titanium investment-casting expertise. Coastcast is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of titanium golf clubs. In addition, the company makes a variety of cast orthopedic implants and surgical tools. According to Coastcast’s medical sales manager, Dennis Brookings, making hard-tooling to produce wax patterns for WorldHeart’s complex castings would have taken at least 18 weeks and cost more than $50,000. And because WorldHeart’s design was still in development, subsequent design changes would have required expensive reworking of the tools.
So Brookings contacted Rapid-Cast in Newport Beach, California. Rapid-Cast suggested using WorldHeart’s CAD model to build casting patterns directly out of a proprietary material with physical characteristics similar to those of conventional investment-casting wax. Coastcast knew that the patterns could be used without any alteration of the company’s casting methods.
Rapid-Cast’s director of engineering, James Klohr, says it took about 3 ½ days to build each of the investment-casting patterns. They measured approximately six inches long, five inches wide, and two inches tall. Klohr says it is capable of delivering superior feature definition and accuracy. Klohr says Rapid-Cast built the parts using a 0.002-inch layer thickness and did no finishing on the parts before delivering them to Coastcast.
Coastcast’s product engineer, Roy Redfern, says the foundry was able to successfully cast all ten of the patterns it received from Rapid-Cast. After casting, he says, the titanium parts were put through a hot-isostatic-pressing (HIP) process to remove any gas inclusions and a chemical-milling (chem-mill) operation to create a super-smooth surface finish. When titanium is cast, it develops a very hard surface that is almost impossible to finish. Chemical milling uses acid to remove this hard shell.
Coastcast was able to deliver the first finished casting to WorldHeart within approximately seven weeks of receiving the CAD file. Over the next four months, it sent WorldHeart an additional nine castings, which WorldHeart used for testing.
As a result of its evaluation of the prototype parts, Corson says, “WorldHeart decided to modify the HeartSaver’s design, both to reduce weight and improve manufacturability. If hard tooling instead of rapid prototyping had been used to create the casting patterns, these design changes would have been much more time-consuming and expensive.”
Currently, Coastcast is in the process of creating hard tooling for preproduction HeartSaver VADTM castings. In the meantime, it also has asked Rapid-Cast to make patterns of WorldHeart’s final design. Thus, weeks before WorldHeart will receive its first castings from the hard tool, Coastcast will be able to deliver production-grade castings of the new HeartSaver VADTM design for further evaluation.
(Taken in part from Incast Magazine, originally from Rapid prototyping report: Editor Geoff Smith-Moritz)

Geometrically unbiased.

Our patterns are a perfect match for molten metal and your imagination to flow freely. As with investment casting, geometry is NOT a factor. Internal cavities, freeform shapes or conventionally machined nightmares are not an issue. Our process is unique in that internal features or cavities do not need to be accessed for post work such as sanding or finishing. Your clients are finally free to design in ways never before imagined thanks to your foundries molten metals and Rapid-Cast patterns.

Category killers.

• Believe it or not even some production runs using Rapid-Cast patterns have proven acceptable. When internal cavities or complex geometries make it impossible to create conventional molds (we've run a few} its an alternative to common manufacturing practices. Although running that many investment cast parts is quite rare, some clients have found the cost acceptable as they produce category killers (market dominating product designs) in their market space.

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