Sand Foundry in China

Sand foundry means the metal foundries, who produce the iron, steel or aluminum castings by sand molds. Sand foundries are very common in the world, there are many sand foundries in China and India.

Sand foundries use different sands to produce different metal castings. They use the green sand (greensand) to produce iron castings, use the dry quartz sand or water glass sand to produce steel castings, and use the very find sand to produce the aluminum castings. Green sand means the sand contains a certain amount of moisture, which is the most common material for the casting process. In addition, there are some new types of sand used for producing iron and steel castings, such as resin sand and pre-coated resin sand.

There are some common equipments in sand foundries. The sand mixing equipments are used for mixing the sands, the molding machines are used for making the sand molds, the cupolas or medium-frequency induction furnaces are used for melting the metals, the sand blasting machines are used to clean the sands on the surfaces of the metal castings. Many sand foundries in China have their own machining equipments to do the rough or finish machining.

Sand foundry has over 6000 years of history, and is the most common metal foundries in the world. There are many advantages for sand foundries, such as very low equipments investments, low material costs, high production rate and comparatively simple production technology. Moreover, sand foundries can produce very small and very large sand castings.

However, there are also many disadvantages of sand foundries, such as comparatively lower casting quality, rough surface smoothness, many casting defects (sand holes, air holes and cracks), sand residues, environment pollution and high power assumption.

Moreover, because of the very poor working conditions, and high physical force, it is difficult to find many skilled workers in sand foundries. The shortage of manpower is dramatically affect the development of sand foundry. Therefore, more and more sand foundries in China are trying to import the automatic molding equipments to replace the workers. However, automatic molding lines have many dimensional, weight and annual demand restriction, so they can not completely replace the foundry workers.

Since the metal castings are the base of civil products and industries, so sand foundry must have a brighter development, but just have to continuously improve the working conditions, worker salaries, environments and production technologies.

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