Travis Pattern & Foundry Inc services

The standard sand casting procedure that we implement for our bronze and aluminum castings is the green sand molding method. With this method the sand, which is mixed with a binder, is packed around the pattern to produce the mold. This is done by hand with pneumatic tools or with our automated sand machine known as a hunter. The patterns are removed from the mold leaving a cavity that will later provide the parts geometry. If the part being cast needs to be hollow or has areas of undercut, a core is used to provide the internal features. One of the great things about the green sand method is that no baking or chemical treatment is required to get the mold to its final state so the cost and time between a finished pattern and a finished part is greatly diminished.

For higher volume orders we implement permanent mold tooling to combat the price per part for aluminum castings. Given a large enough production run permanent mold tooling can pay for itself and minimize lead times. As opposed to packing sand around a pattern to create the cavity for the part, a piece of iron is milled to the appropriate geometry to produce the mold. Once the mold is produced it can be indexed into a vault and pulled anytime the part needs to be run. Whenever possible multiple cavities are machined into a single mold to maximize the number of parts per pour. A single permanent mold can yield thousands of parts and can do so with great consistency. The surface finish and tolerance is comparable to that of die casting.

Our in-house heat treating department has the capability to handle high volumes with minimal turn around. The department boasts seven heat treating ovens and four quench tanks. To reduce the brittleness of our aluminum castings, tempering takes place in multiple aging ovens located through out the plant.

Zinc coating or galvanizing as it is more commonly known, is implemented to create a physical barrier around iron or steel parts to prevent corrosion. The galvanizing tank consists of a molten bath of liquid zinc where parts are submerged through a process referred to as hot dipping.

Our current aluminum output sits at roughly 7 million lbs a year but with the infrastructure and resources that we have in place we could easily double that. Of the aluminum that we produce approximately 85 percent of it ends up being used in house. The remaining 15 percent is shipped out in the form of raw ingot where it is used by other foundries and metallurgical facilities for a variety of applications. To facilitate such a high demand we have both induction and gas furnaces running around the clock on three separate shifts. The majority of our aluminum comes to us in the form of recycled material which we reuse to produce our desired alloys. With major hubs such as Seattle and Portland with in driving distance you can be sure there is no shortage of aluminum, and the only limiting factor to the amount of aluminum we pour is our volume of orders.

Incorporated into our primary sand system is our bronze pouring line. While the majority of our bronze/brass consumption is for electrical transmission components we do produce castings for many other industries. Of the alloys that we pour some of the most common are 955(Aluminum Bronze), 836 (Red Brass), 115 (Red Brass), 875 (Silicon Bronze), 833 (Red brass/Contact metal), and 131 (Red Brass/Contact metal). Our average annually consumption of bronze/brass comes in at roughly a half of a million lbs.