Stainless steel castings or stainless steel investment casting is a lost wax investment casting process in which molten stainless steel is poured into a mold for solidification to obtain a solid stainless steel component of the desired shape. Parts cast in stainless steel provide excellent strength and excellent corrosion and wear resistance without additional machining or plating.
As a professional foundry in China, Yifei Casting Company has experience in casting various stainless steel precision castings. Stainless steel is a steel alloy with a minimum chromium content of 10.5% (mass). We can manufacture customized stainless steel investment castings that meet your design specifications. For precision parts ranging from a few ounces to 100 pounds or more, we can use various stainless steel alloys of various shapes and sizes to make precision castings.
Stainless steel is one of the most popular alloy categories in the investment casting process. The most common alloys we cast are listed below. We can also cast other melt alloys according to your requirements.
303 stainless steel is an austenitic free-cutting stainless and wear-resistant acid steel. If you want to improve the performance of this steel, you can add less than 0.60% of molybdenum to the steel.
303 is a free-cutting stainless steel containing sulfur and selenium, which can improve metal cutting performance and high-temperature adhesion resistance. It is mostly used in automatic lathes, bolts, and nuts.
304 is universal stainless steel, which is widely used to make equipment and parts that require good comprehensive performance (corrosion resistance and formability). SS 304 has good corrosion resistance, heat resistance, low-temperature strength, and mechanical properties, and is convenient for normal temperature processing such as stamping and bending.
304 steel is widely used in household products, cabinets, indoor pipelines, water heaters, boilers, bathrooms, auto parts, medical appliances, building materials, chemicals, food industry, agriculture, marine accessories, etc.
304L is a variant of 304 stainless steel with lower carbon content and is used where welding is required. The lower carbon content minimizes the precipitation of carbides in the heat-affected zone near the weld. The precipitation of carbides may cause intergranular corrosion (welding corrosion) of stainless steel in certain environments. Ideal industries are food & dairy, medical, and petrochemical.
316 stainless steel plate is a grade under the American standard and is austenitic stainless steel. For the national standard, it is 0Cr17Ni12Mo2. It has excellent heat resistance, acid, and alkali corrosion resistance. It is better than SS 304, and its corrosion resistance is better than Cr19Ni9 in seawater and other various media.
410 is a kind of stainless iron, with good corrosion resistance, machining parts, suitable for general-purpose cutting tools. The maximum carbon content is 0.15%, the manganese content is less than 1.00%, the silicon content is less than 1.00%, and the chromium content is less than 11.50%~13.50%. It is a general-purpose heat-treatable stainless steel, corrosion-resistant, heat-resistant, and its hardness can reach 42HRC or higher.
The content of nickel is different, the corrosion resistance of 416 stainless steel is better than that of SS 410. 416 is a kind of stainless steel with better easy-cutting performance. 416 stainless steel is mainly used for the production of solenoid valves, micro motors, and electrical components, and is especially suitable for mass production of automatic lathes and CNC lathes. 416 has better strength and machinability than 304 and 316 and has a lower friction coefficient, but its corrosion resistance is not as good as 304 and 316. 410 stainless steel has good corrosion resistance and machining properties and is general-purpose steel and cutting tool steel.
Stainless steel precision casting investment castings have high dimensional accuracy, generally up to CT4~6 (sand casting is CT10~13, die casting is CT5~7). However, due to the complex process of investment casting, many factors affect the dimensional accuracy of castings. For example, the shrinkage of the abrasive, the deformation of the investment mold, the linear change of the shell during heating and cooling, the shrinkage of the alloy, and the deformation of the casting during the solidification process. Therefore, although the dimensional accuracy of ordinary investment castings is relatively high, its consistency still needs to be improved.
Yifei is a professional casting and forging manufacturer. The production process of each casting is strictly controlled to ensure the highest accuracy of the casting. If you have any questions about investment casting services, you can contact our engineers to solve the problem for you.
