Released on October 19, 2008

Aristo Cast Inc., Almont, Mich., Precision Castings of Tennessee (PCT), Gallatin, Tenn., and Uni-Cast, Londonderry, N.H., won the Investment Casting Institute’s 2008 international casting contest.

The casting contest is open to members of the Investment Casting Institute, Cast Metals Federation and the European Investment Casters Federation. Aristo Cast won in the aerospace engine component category, Precision Castings for military equipment, and Uni-Cast for aerospace electronics.

The winning entries, two magnesium gearbox castings from Aristo Cast, a gear worm wheel by PCT, and a sensor used in a forward looking infrared system (FLIR) from Uni-Cast, were selected because they exemplified the benefits and flexibility of the investment casting process while solving a problem for the end customer. The three winners, along with finalists Alcoa Laval Castings, Laval, Quebec, Canada, Kovatch Castings Inc., Uniontown, Ohio, TITAL Gmbh, Restwig, Germany, and TPM Inc., Sugar Land, Texas, were announced during the 12th World Conference on Investment Casting.

Aristo Cast’s customer’s engineering staff had originally designed the gearbox in aluminum but, due to weight constraints, required the unit to be made of magnesium. The two prototype castings which comprise the upper and lower gearbox are 5 x 6 x 5 in. and 6 x 6 x 2 in. The gearbox contains bosses, cast-in holes and thick-to-thin walls.

The 16.75 x 16 x 14-in. FLIR sensor by Uni-Cast is cast in beryllium-free aluminum (F357). The customer’s weight and design requirements dictated investment casting as the only process capable of producing the light-weight geometry at a reasonable price.

Precision Castings redesigned several component castings in the M171 telescope and quadrant mount used on the M777 lightweight 155 mm Howitzer without changing the critical dimensions. The gear worm wheel’s primary function is to guide the movement of the telescope and quadrant mount. Because of increased forces from the recoil of the weapon, which were no longer being absorbed by the weight of the weapon system, castings had to be made stronger without losing corrosion resistance and stability.