Cracking down on mold drying times has our team split

Our boss switched how we dry sand molds before casting. Now we use fans instead of waiting overnight. Some say it speeds up jobs and works fine. I've seen more cracks and think it risks quality. What's your method for drying molds?

2 comments

2 Comments

wendyb331d ago

We had the same fight at Mercer Foundry a few years back. The push for faster turnover is real, but forcing it with high speed fans always made our complex cores brittle. What finally worked was setting up low speed fans in a closed room for a set four hour period, not just blasting them. It’s a compromise, sure, and the floor manager hated the extra step, but it cut our overnight dry times in half without the crack rate we saw before. Your post totally reminds me of that, where rushing the dry is just baking the outside and leaving weakness inside. Sometimes the old slow way is just better for the tricky molds.

christopher3861d ago

Man that hits home, we wrecked a whole batch of parts trying to speed dry them and they came out looking okay but snapped like twigs inside.