Investment & Metal Casting
Trace every casting back to the shell, the pour and the heat.
MaintenanceIQ supports investment and metal casting shops with casting records that already ship inside the Foundry package, from shell weight control to computed yield, on top of an industrial CMMS. It helps your shell room lead, your melt shop and your quality head find where scrap starts, and keeps the maintenance behind it planned.
An illustrative day
A day in an investment casting shop
07:00. Wax patterns come off the injection press and are assembled onto trees. The die behind each pattern has its master record, its variants and revisions, and a tool life count, so your toolroom knows when the die is due for its next PM.
09:00. In the shell room, slurry viscosity, ambient temperature, humidity and dry time are logged against their bands. One reading sits outside the humidity band, and the shell room lead sees it on the record before the next coat.
11:30. After dewax, each shell is weighed at the station screen and judged against its pattern's band. A light shell is flagged before firing. The Shell Weight station works offline and syncs when the network returns, so a weak signal near the autoclave does not stop the weighing.
14:00. Burnout firing is logged, the heat is melted and checked against the alloy grade, and trees are poured. Each pour is its own record, tied to its heat.
Next day. After knockout, cut-off and inspection, including NDT and FPI, each casting is recorded good or scrap by defect code and by the stage found. Yield and the defect Pareto by pattern and alloy are computed from those records, not typed in.
Casting depth that ships today
All of this is part of the Foundry & Metals package. Some items are add-ons inside it, noted below.
Shell weight control
Each shell is weighed after dewax and judged against its pattern's band: target plus tolerance, a baseline study, or derived from shells already weighed. The verdict and band are frozen on every record, with runs, a control chart, alerts and CSV or Excel export.
How: On by default with the Foundry package
Shell room control
Slurry viscosity, ambient temperature and humidity, and shell dry time, classified in or out of band. Castings per tree are recorded too. Shown only for investment shops.
Dewax and burnout logs
Firing logs for dewax and burnout sit alongside the shell and the heat, so a defect can be read against the firing it went through.
Pattern master, pours and outcomes
Patterns are a master. A heat pours many trees or moulds, and each pour is a record. Each outcome is good or scrap by defect code and stage found, including NDT and FPI stages.
Computed yield and defect Pareto
Casting yield is good divided by poured, by pattern and by alloy. It is a computed join across pours and outcomes, with a defect Pareto beside it.
Spectro chemistry vs grade bands
An alloy grade master holds per-element bands, and each heat's spectro result is classified In or Out. Charge mix gives melt cost per tonne from your rates.
From dispatch back to the heat
The production route module lets your shop compose its own route, for example core assembly, moulding, melting, pouring, knockout, finishing, inspection and dispatch. A casting lot travels the route and is stamped at each stage with operator, time, quantity and scrap. A WIP board answers the question your sales team asks every day: where is my order?
At the melt, pour and inspection stages, the lot links to the quality record captured there. So a dispatched casting drills back to the heat and the chemistry it was poured from. That is traceability, not tick boxes.
- Configurable route, no hardcoded stage list
- Per-stage stamp: operator, time, quantity, scrap
- WIP board by current stage
- Lot genealogy to heat, pour and outcome
Tooling and wax injection dies
The die and tooling master is a licensable add-on of the Foundry package. A die is a reconfigurable block of steel, and what it is set up to produce is a record: a master, variants and revisions. A child is cloned from its parent, so editing a master never rewrites what a variant ran last year.
Each record carries ten process stages from injection to dispatch, with drawings and PPAP packs filed against the die or a single record, and field-level history of every change. Approved metals act as a pour lock. Tool life is logged at a shot count, with last PM, shots since and next due worked out for you.
Maintenance under the casting process
Casting quality depends on equipment that holds its settings: injection presses, slurry tanks, dewax autoclaves, burnout furnaces, melters and the instruments that measure them. Core CMMS runs work orders, preventive maintenance by calendar or by usage, calibration with uploaded certificates, spare parts and downtime for all of them.
Condition monitoring comes with the Foundry package. Set warning and critical limits on parameters such as furnace temperature or autoclave pressure, feed readings by hand, from a PLC or SCADA gateway, or by CSV import, and let a critical reading open a breakdown. VDA 6.3 and IATF 16949 evidence packs build from the same records.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a separate casting product?
No. Casting depth ships inside the Foundry & Metals package. Shell weight control, shell room control, dewax and burnout logs, NDT and FPI stages, pours, outcomes, computed yield and spectro chemistry are all part of it.
What does capability fit mean here?
It means the platform fits the need, but the specific feature is not part of what ships today. We start with a pilot on one line, agree the scope with you, and say plainly what is and is not covered.
Does the shell weight station need a network?
No. The Shell Weight station works offline and syncs when the network returns. The rest of the app loads when the signal drops, but saving work needs a connection.
Can we see which defects come from the shell room?
Yes. Outcomes record the defect code and the stage where it was found, and the defect Pareto runs by pattern and alloy. Shell room and shell weight records sit beside them for the same patterns.