GMC : 6 SLICE ALUMINUM CASTING
Gujarat Metal Cast (GMC) is a foundry specializing in lost foam aluminum casting based out of Gujarat, India. Rollamo Engineering has been machining a variety of castings for GMC for more than 20 years. In 2008, Rollamo worked on a critical project for developing an aluminum casting called 6 slice, which was a hydraulic system valve body part for their end customer Wabtec Corporation in USA
Tooling
Understanding the criticality and the complexity of the component, Rollamo’s engineering team cut the casting into 6 cross sectional slices and made the mold for the lost foam casting process. Further, gluing fixtures were developed to accurately join the form patterns into a single casting component
Machining
The casting required precision machining on all six sides making referencing critical for this project. Two sides were machined individually whereas four sides were machined by rotary indexing (4th axis machining). Special purpose cutting tools were developed for carrying out a total of 150 operations on the casting.
Rollamo’s expertise and continuous improvement resulted in optimizing original cycle time by 50%, bringing it down to 35 mins.
